back to school

I've enjoyed seeing everyone's back to school photos of social media these past few weeks, though they make me realize that I must be either one click off age-wise or else totally disconnected from current parenting trends, as I have never in my life taken a picture of my kid holding a sign (or if you want to get real fancy, a blackboard) broadcasting what grade they were going into. (Another trend that either came later or else that I just totally ignored was that thing where you put a giant sticker on the front of your kids' onesie telling everyone how many months old they are.) I mean, not that I don't take a picture of my kids on approximately the first day of school, because I do...kind of. But it just seems like there are so many things and rituals and accoutrement now. Like the child-rearing industry is slowly becoming the bridal industry.

But speaking of back to school...

Around the end of last year (right around, oh, say...Wednesday November 9th), I started thinking about how I could get more involved in healthcare on a broader level. I love my job and have no plans to stop being an anesthesiologist, but I also wanted to do something...else. Something more. Something less zoomed in, something a little more macro, something more policy and population-based. A broader way to help out. So what I decided to do was to go back to school and get a Masters of Public Health.

This was not an easy decision. Getting this degree is going to take a lot of time. It comes with a not-inconsequential monetary cost. I don't "need" to do it, and in most ways it's going to make my life a lot harder. It's not linked to any particular path for upward mobility or higher earning power, and I'm not looking to switch jobs. Almost no one that I'm close to understands why I want to do this, or thinks its remotely a good idea. (My parents seemed initially excited at the news, but then rapidly realized that I said I was getting an MPH, not an MBA, as they misheard. They were much less excited after that.) Oh, and also, I don't really have a really good specific idea of what exactly I want to do with this degree when (or if) I finally complete it. If I'm going to be totally honest, the only real reason I want to go back to school is because I want to learn more about public health, and can only hope that in the process of going through the coursework I'm going to find a useful, real-life way to marry this knowledge with my current career and find a good, real-world application for it. But I don't know what that's going to look like yet.

So anyway, that's happening. I've been accepted to the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia, and will be starting their part-time executive MPH program next week. "Part-time" means I still will working my normal job, exactly the same as before. It also means a lot of remote work and an online curriculum, though once a month, for one long weekend (Thursday through Sunday, all day long), I will be flying into New York and completing my in-person classroom requirement. This, every month, for two years. We had an on-campus orientation in August. The first official day of classes is next week on September 14th. If I can get through this all without losing my mind, I'll be slated to graduate in August of 2019.

The time investment. The time investment is...a lot. I take it seriously. I work part-time at the hospital, but I have three kids (which is why I went part-time in the first place), and kids don't just go on auto-pilot. Doing this program necessarily translates into less time for me for them. It means more time in the evening spent in front of books, more than twice as many weekends I will be out of the picture, less flexibility for everyone all around. This was Joe's main objection to me starting this program. I don't think I'm airing any dirty laundry by talking about this, because he'd tell you just as easily: he doesn't think this is such a great idea. He's nominally supportive, and by that I guess I just mean he would never tell me explicitly not to do it. But for our family, I know he'd really rather I just...didn't. He doesn't see why we spent so many years getting to a point where our life was finally getting easier only to deliberately make it harder again.

But that was my exact thinking, only in reverse. We have three kids. Our youngest, Nina, just started kindergarten this year. I'm not saying our kids still aren't youngish (they are), or that they don't need me as much (they do, though the ways in which they need me are less about immediate survival and more about presence and guidance and...well, I guess I do all the food shopping and cooking, so, yes, maybe a little bit of survival). But it's a bit easier now. We have some breathing room. We have margins. What do you do with that elasticity? What else do you want to do? What's important to you? Is it about the luxury of empty space, or is it about the luxury to take on more? To do more with your life? What comes next?

Also. I finished residency nine years ago. Nine years into private practice. I love my current job, I love taking care of patients. It's the most rewarding, immediate, and intimate type of service I could ever hope to provide. (I know I'm supposed to say, "outside of parenthood" right here, but I won't. It's not that I don't think parenthood is important, I just feel it's a completely different thing.) But I feel like there's more I want to do. I just don't know how yet, so I want to learn. Because life is not lived in order to be easy. Life is lived to be worthwhile.

And honestly, once I decided to go ahead and do this thing, part of me was really tickled and excited about the idea of going back to school. It's been a long time. And I like school. I like learning. I like knowing things. I especially like knowing things that I feel I should know already. I've been doing some pre-reading for some of my classes, and there are so many things I'm learning now--about healthcare economics, policy, the history of Medicare and Medicaid--that I can't believe I hadn't been explicitly taught before. And the fact that I'll be back at school right where I started, at Columbia, on the health science campus...I just get a kick out of returning "home." (Columbia friends: the School of Public Health is located in the old Psych Institute, next door to the new Psych Institute, two doors down from our first year prison dorm rooms in Bard Hall. That was a grim little block wasn't it?)

So anyway. That's what's new with me. How have you been doing?

quotidian

Cal was supposed to bring a pumpkin to school on Tuesday for some sort of jack o' lantern carving activity in his class. There was an ostensibly academic twist to it (I think they were weighing and measuring the pumpkins first, converting ounces to pounds or stones to hectares, whatever antiquated non-metric systems we still insist on teaching despite the fact that they make NO SENSE) but let's get real, the true purpose of such an activity is to claw out all the pumpkin guts and show your friends the clotted mass of stringy entrails while making a variety of throw-up noises.

Cal left his pumpkin at home by accident, so when I went to drop it off at his classroom (ordinarily in such cases I leave the forgotten item at the front desk and someone from the office ferries it upstairs to the classroom so as to minimize disruption--however, in this case the pumpkin was gigantic and when I offered to carry it up myself they happily left the hoisting to me) I kind of got roped into coming back in later that afternoon to help Cal's teacher with the activity. Honestly, my first instinct when the teacher asked me if I could be an extra set of adult hands (in the setting of 26 fourth graders wielding a variety of hollowed out gourds and serrated blades) was to beg off because look man, I'm busy. But that response was a reflex, ingrained from years and years of having to say no to stuff. Because I actually wasn't busy that day. And having the time to do things like this in the kids' classroom was precisely the reason that I went part-time in the first place.

Which brings me to the topic for today, which I have deliberately been shying away from because the kind of honesty with which I want to discuss this is precisely the kind of thing that causes fistfights to break out in the comments section of The New York Times "Motherlode" blog. (Leaving aside the truly questionable decision to call a parenting series "Motherlode," because random puns aside, parenting is only for ladies, y'all!)

Joe and I agree that since I have made the move to go part-time at work, the quality of our home life has never been better. The benefits are obvious--I have more time to spend with each kid, I am more connected with what they are doing at school and at home, we can actually schedule doctors and dentist and teacher appointments, we are all eating better, acting out less...the list goes on and on. And there are moments every single day when I think, "Thank god we finally decided to do this." The mornings I spend with Nina after the boys are off at school. Time that I get to carve out to spend with Mack alone, which I hardly ever had a chance to do before. Having time for actual conversations with Cal, who for all his idiosyncrasies as a young child is actually turning out to be a pretty cool and funny kid. These are the obvious good things. These are the things that make it clear that the decision to dial back at work was worthwhile.

But of course these are the things that just make parenting in general a joy, and between these clearly treasured moments are the interstices, the webbing, the connective tissue that binds the important bits in a dense fiber of the banal. Because for every morning I spend with Nina watching the sun rise over the Chattahoochee there is of course an entire day of chasing down lost shoes and changing diapers and washing clothes, cleaning up one mess in the kitchen while Nina is creating the next mess because allowing her to create the next mess is the only way I can buy time to clean up the first mess. For every special afternoon with Mack there is the endless run of school pickups, school dropoffs, making sure that lunchboxes are packed and thermoses are not lost at school, corralling shoes and socks and sweatshirts and more socks, items which surely must walk around at night after we're asleep because otherwise there's no explanation for how they spread out and hide all over the house. And for every pumpkin carving activity I do at the kids' school, there is an hour of sweeping up sticky pumpkin seeds, picking up strips of newspaper and magazines that have glued themselves to the linoleum with bioglue, and wiping down desk after desk with antibacterial wipes and hoping to god that the janitorial staff at night come equipped with mops. (Though to be clear: I was more than happy to help, and Cal's teacher was a brave, brave man to even consider staging the mass class pumpkin carve-a-thon without a second adult around. We could have probably used another two or three adults, to be honest.)

It is in these moments, with the brooms or with the wet rags or running in and out of the supermarket or picking up the dropped (well, hurled) sippy cup again for the five hundredth time that I think: It doesn't have to be me doing this. This does not involved an advanced degree, or special training. ANYONE could do this. Or, perhaps more precisely to the point: I took a 40% pay cut in order to wash dishes and do laundry? DOES NOT COMPUTE.

(This is the part where people start polishing their pitchforks. Hey, you missed a spot!)

Look, I know that it's not the special advanced skill with which I drive to carpool or wash the dishes or make the school lunches that the time worthwhile--it's the fact that I'm doing it for my kids that makes it special. I get that. And I also get that, with parenthood, the amazing moments are not in the majority--that it is, in fact, the intermittent and punctuated nature of the awesome moments that make you get up each day and do all the non-awesome stuff over and over and over again. And that's probably true about most things in life, though I'm beginning to find that there's something different about spending a full day parenting rather than a full day being a doctor: it feels less special.

(And here is where you start jabbing the pitchforks. Jab on, gentle village people! Miss ye not the tender essential organs!)

And when I say "special," I don't mean to say that my kids aren't special, or that my parenting them isn't special. It's just that in the mundane moments, it feels like anyone could be doing this. I didn't need to go to college or medical school or spend five years in residency training to do that stuff. My educational background, or training, or the years I spent before I had kids doesn't inform my daily parenting in any meaningful way. It's just me, doing what millions and millions or other people are also doing at the exact same time--probably I'm not even doing as good a job as many of them are, because HAVE YOU SEEN PINTEREST? Just me, momming it up like a character in a Sunny Delight commercial, part of the hoarde, one of a type, a piece of a marketing demographic. And that's the part that doesn't feel special.

And the thing that bothers me is that I never considered myself someone who needed to feel special, or who cared about status. I don't make people call me "doctor," I don't wear my diplomas around my neck on a giant chain, and I think I've worked most of my professional life to try to put aside whatever ego may manifest in my persona because quite simply I don't think it serves any purpose. But obviously it must have mattered to me more than I thought, because while I recognize the luxury of spending more time with my children, and for all my whining I have plenty of help in keeping this family going; I still sometimes think, this is it? THIS is what I miss work two days a week to do?

Because at work, it sometimes seems like the significance of what you're doing is obvious. That the answer to the question, "What did you do today?" could be succinctly summed up by saying: I'm a doctor, I take care of patients. Boom. Instant credibility. Credibility to whom, unclear--perhaps it's just to justify things to myself. But on the days that I'm "off" with the kids...

JOE

So, what did you do today?

MICHELLE

Well, after breakfast I dropped the boys off at school, then I took Nina to the park. Then we came home, and while she took a nap I cleaned up the kitchen. Then I started to prep stuff for dinner, but then she woke up, so I gave her lunch. Then I cleaned up after lunch. After that we kind of played a little bit out back, and then it was time to pick up the boys again. So we did! And then I finished making dinner. And then everyone ate and I cleaned that up.

JOE

Sounds good.

MICHELLE

...

JOE

What?

MICHELLE

You know, when I say it all like that it sounds like I didn't do anything.
But then how come it took up the whole damn day?

Obviously this is something I'm still working out in my brain, and clearly part of it is that there are societal indicators of what is considered "important work" that I have allowed to imprint on me (despite the fact that I obviously know that raising my children is important work, therefore the need to take more time to do it right). Also obvious to me is that this probably reflects poorly on my personality in some way--some sort of egomaniacal needs that are not being met by the quotidian tasks of parenting three young children being chief among my deficiencies. But I am curious, particularly after reading this article in the Times a few months ago--does this experience of "status loss" or this sense of becoming unmoored from part of your identity ring true for anyone else who decided to take one step back from a career that has in many ways defined them?

straddling

I had to take our minivan to the dealership for a physical (I don't know--what do you call it when you have to take your car in for a visit to the car doctor? A well-car check? I plead ignorance and this parenthetical is now threatening now to take over the whole intro) and at the dealership they have honest to god carrels in a room off the waiting area, like a damn library. On one hand--how great! A quiet area with a desk and a chair and a power outlet to get some actual work done! And on the other hand--how long do you expect that I'm going to be sitting here, exactly?

Well, nothing like a stretch of captivity to force you to update your foundering blog. Ahoy hoy.

Last week was my last week of working full-time. My first "official" week of working at a 60% schedule is actually the week of Labor Day, but I had this week fortuitously scheduled as a week off from almost a year ago, like I planned it this way the whole time, for transition. It's not so much a vacation as purely a maintenance period for our family (MAINTENANCE! That's the kind of car visit I'm at now! Le mot juste!) meaning yesterday I took Mack to the dentist and tomorrow I'm taking Nina for her one year well-child check and now I'm here looking at a wonderful hubcap display and wondering if I should get purple under-light effects to make our suburban splendor-mobile that much more splendid. I mean, it seems excessive and yet this pamphlet makes such a compelling case for them...

I am so excited to enter this next phase of being more engaged or at the very least present for my out-of-hospital responsibilities, but I acknowledge that various internalized cultural attitudes have been a little difficult for me to shake. Namely, I find that I really have to check myself from being too defensive when people talk to me about my part-time status. 

JOE

(As we are engaged in high-level strategy talks about managing yet another week of juggling 

call schedules, OR and clinic times, childcare, meal timing, and after school activities)

Man, this is hard. I can't wait until you start slacking off at work a little bit.

MICHELLE

SLACKING OFF?

JOE

I mean...not slacking...I mean...you know what I mean! Working less! Working less at the hospital!

MICHELLE

THERE IS NO SLACKING INVOLVED HERE. NO SLACK. 

ALWAYS WORKING! HARD WORKER ME!

Or possibly this:

CO-WORKER

So, you're going part-time, huh? Sounds nice.

MICHELLE

(Cautiously)

Yes...

CO-WORKER

Gotta go be mom. I get it. I wish I could do that.

MICHELLE

DO YOU THINK THIS WAS AN EASY DECISION OR SOMETHING?

BECAUSE IT WASN'T! NOTHING EASY! EVERYTHING HARD!

CO-WORKER

Uh...

(Starts backing away, feeling for the doorknob)

And also:

RANDOM PERSON

Hello--

MICHELLE

(Pointing)

AND YOU! I'LL HAVE YOU KNOW THAT I HAVE AN EXCELLENT WORK ETHIC.

RANDOM PERSON

Aha. Huh. Well, as I was saying, "Hello, and welcome to Target."

Anyway, sorry world. Obviously I am having feelings. It's like I'm all messed up on my Erikson's stages. Instead of "Generativity vs. Stagnation" I've regressed back to "Identity vs. Confusion." (Also, can we all acknowledge that the fact that I even remember any of this from second year med school psych is pretty fucking impressive? OK, not so impressive, but notable at least.)

I don't know why I default to the defensive--maybe I need to prove to myself and everyone that I'm not "slacking off" or "opting out" or taking some slow boat to Shangri-La. Not that anyone has implied that, I think it's pretty clear that going part-time at work amounts more to scaling back on one type of (rewarding, highly-paid) work and scaling up on another type of work which is both unpaid and elicits a less direct, calculable form of appreciation. Not that I need my head patted constantly, but I think many of us have experienced the Moebius strip that is the endless cycle of keeping a three-kid household running smoothly, and how the loss of old workday landmarks can make things both easier and harder.

I know I'm probably stomping all over the landmines with this but just hear me out, I'm sitting in the backroom of a Toyota dealership waiting for them to finish checking my brake fluid or god knows what else so this is a bit of a rush job. I realize that my defensiveness is just part of my natural adjustment to our new situation (see also: guilt at bringing home less bacon than I was before, particularly after many years of being the primary or equal bacon...herder) but this all makes me happy that I have the option to partially scale back as opposed to having to make a binary choice to be all in or all out. The identity loss I'd have without some career focus would definitely be traumatic, and I think that this option, the part-time option, might allow me the best of both worlds. That's the theory anyway, and hopefully once I see that, I'll stop alternately taking everyone's head off and showily doing one-armed push-ups to prove that I'm JUST AS POWERFUL AS I EVER WAS.

(Psychological problems! I has them!)

*          *          *

I was going to write some more stuff here, but in the interest of just getting this up and saying BLOG UPDATE: MISSION ACCOMPLISHED I'm going to save that for next time. My goal in general, by the way, is for there to be a next time more consistently, and to do a little more writing in addition to the other thousand things that I've been neglecting in the past year. And now I have no idea how to end this  entry so I guess I'll just put in this video of Nina lurching around because didn't you hear, she's a toddler now.  Unreal.

recalibrating

I know there's a touch of irony in adding this disclaimer given that I haven't updated this blog in, like, half a year, but: LONG ENTRY AHEAD.

There's a snippet of a cartoon I remember from my childhood--I can't remember if it was "Tom and Jerry" but if it wasn't it was in a similar vein--where a mouse is reclining in a hot tub. He's sitting back with his arms along the rim of the tub, maxing and relaxing as cartoon mice do, wearing that look of smug satisfaction he was prone to. (As an aside: I never liked Jerry. I always thought he was a real jerk to Tom, a cat who was just fulfilling his evolutionary imperative after all. Ditto Road Runner. Ditto those capering harpy kids that keep taking the Trix away from the rabbit. JUST GIVE HIM A BOWL, YOU ASSHOLES.)

So anyway, the mouse. He's enjoying the hot tub. He's relishing the water, the heat. But the water starts to get a little bit hotter. And a little bit hotter still. Suddenly it's not so comfortable anymore. Not hot enough that he wants to get out of the tub or anything, but just...hotter. He starts sweating. His fur starts getting a little frizzy (from the humidity, you understand). Then, finally, he turns around and notices the cat behind him, slicing onions and carrots to add into the now boiling water. (My memory of this part is not quite as clear, but the cat may have been wearing a chef's toque.)

I've thought of that cartoon clip a lot in the last year.

But let me back up for a second.

If you've ever followed this blog with regularity in the past (though I'm sure with my sporadic updates I've winnowed that number down to only the die-hardest of die-hards) you've probably noticed that I haven't had the time to write much of substance since I went back to work after my maternity leave last September, and that I haven't updated basically at all since December. The reasons are all those that you could probably expect: busy job, three kids, and the responsibilities and duties associated therein. The explanations are always boring because everyone's reasons for being busy are pretty much the same, but to put it in medical terms: it's just a matter of triage.

It's hard to know where the tipping point was--though I have to presume that it was at least in part associated with the addition of our much-beloved third child into the mix--but at some point in the last year, things started getting hard. Not impossible, not un-doable, but subtly, Joe and I started to notice just how tight things were getting. Time was tight, at home, with the kids, with each other. Emotional resources were tight. Patience was less of a resource we could reliably depend on. The days and weeks started becoming these things that we were enduring, rather than living, let alone enjoying. Again, the imagery from an old movie comes to mind--inmates in a prison, grimly notching off yet another day on the wall of their cell.

I don't mean to imply that our life is a joyless dirge--far from it. We love our family, we love our jobs. Even working the hours that we do, we try carve out quality time when we can--long weekends, holidays, family vacations where they fit in. We bolus our family time because our basal infusion rate is so parsimonious, but we do make an effort to compensate. And we liked to tell ourselves that this bolus dosing was sufficient, and it worked...not well, but well enough.

But it didn't change the fact that over the past few years, and over the last year in particular, the feeling of our everyday lives becoming something that we were tolerating started to feel more an more pervasive. When you only see your kids for an hour or two at the very tail-end of each day, only to perform the most basic of maintenance for them (bath! brush teeth! yell at them for not taking their baths and brushing their teeth quickly enough because I'm tired and they're tired and everyone's tired so LET'S ALL GO TO BED AS SOON AS POSSIBLE) you start to feel like you're consisting on a diet of discarded crusts in an otherwise empty pizza box. Maybe you can piece together a life in these scraps of the day, but split between three kids, it's simply not enough time.

Joe and I have been discussing for years our long-term outlook for modifying (read: decreasing) the work hours for at least one of us to have more time with the kids, and for the longest time, our party line has been: soon. We're going to do it soon. "Maybe in a few years or so," was the stock phrase. But there was always the next thing. We'll think about it when I finish my fellowship. We'll figure it out it when I get more settled in my job. We'll do it if I make partner in my group. Later. We'll do it. But later. Meanwhile, time marches on.

Then: I was talking with one of my partners at work a few months ago. He has four kids, the oldest of whom had just turned eight. "I just realized," he said as we were chatting in the front hall of the OR, sidestepping a stretcher careening down the hallway from the PACU, "that he's eight. In another eight years, he's going to be in high school, driving, getting ready to go to college. Half my time with him is already done. I mean, they come home after they go to college and all, but you know what that's like. It's not the same. Half my time of having my son in my house is over already."

There feeling that I had after having that conversation was not unlike being wrapped in a piece of wet burlap and gently asphyxiated. Because Cal was turning eight too. Half our time raising our oldest son in our home was done, and not only had this particular calculus not ever occurred to me, but looking back, I can't say I really know where those eight years went.

Because see, we've always lived like this. Cal was born when we were residents. His entire life--and thus of course, Mack and Nina's entire life too--we've worked. Both Joe and I have worked our tails off. We're not residents anymore of course, and some of the specifics of our jobs have changed from year to year, but the fact of it is that we each work on average 50-60 hours a week, more if we're taking weekend call, and although we've been saying for years that we were going to try to get more control of our work schedules to put some more time into our family life, it hadn't happened yet. The decision point was always pushed off down the road. Later. Soon. Not yet. Someday. And now Cal was turning eight and I have no idea how time passed so fast.

If I'm going to be completely honest with myself I'm sure some of this particular grim inertia was also linked to a perverse macho pride. I've always spoken a lot about work-life balance in medicine and how these antiquated notions, about doctors functioning as around-the-clock automatons sacrificing their personal lives for the greater good, would have to evolve along with the rest of the world. But I think that in some ways I felt safe championing the choice for others to go part-time because I myself chose to work full-time. You do what works for your family, everyone's definition of work-life balance is different. But saying it from the vantage point of someone with three kids and still worked full-time herself felt like a secure platform from which to proselytize, like I was somehow above reproach from people who might accuse all part-time doctors of being lazy or uncommitted. DO WHAT YOU NEED TO DO; BUT AS FOR MYSELF, I AM DOING ALL THE THINGS.

And to be honest, we were getting by. It wasn't wonderful, but it was OK. We were surviving. Maybe we weren't "living our best life" to invoke an Oprah-ism (and I don't even know how I know that since I never even watched Oprah) but...day to day, we were getting by.

And then, the week before Memorial Day, our nanny of five years quit. With no warning, and giving zero notice. She just left one day and mentioned on her way out the door that she wasn't coming back.

Boom. Game-changer.

I'm not going to talk too much about the nanny thing because frankly, after probably the most stressful two months of our lives, I'm just over it. It wasn't even so much the issue of finding a new nanny--though that, obviously, was a huge part of solving our problems, at least in the short term.  But the larger and more important part was having to honestly evaluate our life, our choices, and just how much time we did indeed spend at work, away from our children. It was like turning the stark, faintly buzzing fluorescent exam light onto the fish-white underbelly of what kept things functioning at a level that passed as "OK" for the past five years. And what we realized was that: it really isn't OK. Having to outsource this much of our children's care--of our children's lives--to someone else, particularly someone who after five years could walk out on them without so much as a backwards glance...is not OK.

(This is putting aside the obvious logistical difficulty of finding a non-live-in person to work 50-60 hours a week. It's a tough sell to say the least. One suggestion, perhaps less helpful than most, was that we should just hire two nannies. To which my reaction was, if you have to hire two people to take care of your kids while you're at work, it's possible you're not spending enough time with your kids.)

So. Joe and I discussed and agonized and number crunched and evaluated. We talked to a lot of people. We agonized some more. And what's going to happen now is this: as of September 1st, I will be going part-time at my job. Joe and I would have been fine with either one of us working less, but because of the ways our jobs are structured, it makes more sense right now for the part-time working parent to be me. My new schedule will have me working three days a week, mixed in with my share of nights, weekend and holiday call. And my main goal for the other two days of the week? To do some of the things that I've never been able to do with my kids because I've haven't had the time. Simply to be around more.

I know this all seems unnecessarily melodramatic of an announcement to some, because plenty of people in a multitude of fields choose to work part-time. But for me, it is a big deal, because to be honest, when you're accustomed to following a prescribed path, swimming against the current for a change can be scary. And there are a lot of issues--job guilt, fear of resentment from co-workers or being perceived as less than fully committed to medicine, concerns about crippling my career potential--that I'm working through having finally made this decision. There's a fear of not wanting to let people down.

But that's it on the other side too, isn't it? I don't want to let people down. I want to do my job well. All my jobs. And I think that right now, I need to spend more time with my kids. Nothing's broken, I still love being an anesthesiologist, and the fact that I've worked full-time for the first eight years of parenthood wasn't the wrong call nor has it damaged our family. It's just that our choices then are not the same as our choices now, and when we have better options we owe it to ourselves to take them. We could be making more of this life. We could be doing better.

I'm not going to be there hovering in the periphery for every single second of my kids' lives, nor frankly should I be. But I'm looking forward to just being around more.

So that's what's going on with us. In most ways, it's really no big thing. But in other ways, it's the biggest thing.

a picture is worth something something

A wordless entry for Joe's birthday (well, mostly wordless), because really, what else is there to say?  Well, except that the kids chose the cake flavor (radioactive strawberry) and the frosting colors (myriad).  COULD YOU TELL?

Happy birthday, Joe!  You're one of the good ones, and we love you.

Edited to add: not achieved through some sort of crazy photo trickery, but indeed those birthday candles are burning with different colored flames. (The effect probably would have looked more dramatic with the lights out, but oh well, maybe next time we'll have our party at night or, at the very least, not in front of a window.)  I figure there must be some sort of inorganic additive in the filament--Chemistry wonks can probably help me with this--but the kids thought it was pretty awesome.

the jinx that stole christmas

(Sunday night, on call)



MICHELLE
Honey, I just got called, I’m going to head into the hospital.
There’s a case that’s going to start in about an hour.

JOE
OK. What’s the case?

MICHELLE
A lap appy.

JOE
Oh, well that’s easy, and it should be quick.

MICHELLE
I’m going to kill you now.

JOE
Oops, right! Sorry!

MICHELLE
You’re going to jinx it, you jinxer. OK, I’m getting out of here.
Let me just grab my coffee travel mug.

JOE
You have decaf in there, or full-caf?

MICHELLE
What? I don’t drink decaf. It’s just regular coffee.

JOE
Oh. I thought you might want decaf.

MICHELLE
Why?

JOE
Well, it’s kind of late for coffee. How are you going to fall asleep tonight?

(Silence)

MICHELLE
OK, I was kidding before, but now I really am going to kill you.


(Fin)

a marriage of convenience

A text message exchange from earlier this week:

JOE
Momo, don't laugh at me, but I have a patient and I want

blood ready for the surgery, but might not need it. Should I

"type and screen" or "type and crossmatch"?

MICHELLE

Depends how fast you would need it. If you want it

sitting outside the OR to give at a minute's notice,

type and cross. If you will unlikely need it immediately

and have 30 minutes lead time once you think

you might want to transfuse, type and screen.

MICHELLE

Crossmatch involves an additional step, typing the

unit of donor blood against the patient's blood.

JOE
Type and cross dress? Ever done that?

MICHELLE

Yes, that's where the blood bank put the unit

in a dress and heels.

For my own vanity I will leave out the countless occasions that I texted Joe in the middle of the day asking him ridiculously simplistic questions about the human eye as it pertains to my scope of practice (that is to say: mostly corneal abrasions, and when it is OK to use nitrous after a scleral buckle). We are like a built in free consult service for each other. Marriage!

scenes from a marriage

When you are on home call--that is to say, call wherein you are carrying a pager (or in my case, two cell phones--one is a backup in case AT&T's notoriously patchy service drops a call on my iPhone) but not necessarily physically in the hospital, all you can think about is that your phone could ring at any time. AT ANY TIME. At any moment, you could get a call from the nursing supervisor telling you to get into the hospital now, there's some old guy with an aortic dissection, or some lady with a small bowel obstruction, or some kid with appendicitis who needs to go to the OR, so get your ass back here in the next twenty minutes.

I'm sure after a couple more decades of taking home call, I'll be inured to the catecholamine surge that accompanies every phone call, every text message, every twinge that indicates that someone somewhere might be trying to reach me, but...I'm not at that point yet. I'm just being totally honest with you: carrying a pager at home stresses me out more than carrying a pager at work. It just feels like the stakes are higher, or more invasive, like the hospital is bleeding into your home somehow. And having been on the receiving end of some pretty bad call weekends, I am admittedly a little bit...sensitive about things.

Now, these are some things not to say to someone who is on call:

"So...are you going to get called in?"

"You're probably not going to get called in, right?"

"Can I run to the supermarket real fast and leave you with the kids? What? Why not?"

"You're probably safe now, right? I mean, what are the odds you're going to get called in now?"

"What do you mean you're backup call overnight? But just backup, right? They won't need you, right? I mean, what are the odds?"

"WHY ARE YOU SO ANNOYED AT ME?"

This is why Joe and I are having a little time-out right now.

just like the griswolds




So, one of the many things that has happened since I last updated in May is that we went on our vacation the week of Memorial Day. We went to this place. And it was fun, but I realized something about myself, which is that when it comes to my kids, I am both filled with guilt and deeply neurotic. (Hey, I didn't say it was a new insight, guys.) While I think this tendency is likely multifactorial, I think in large part it is probably related to the fact that I started having kids early in my medical training, and am therefore accustomed to feeling like I am wronging everyone equally no matter what I do.




(Mack in particular feels wronged. He also feels like John Belushi.)

So, Tyler Place. We (that is to say, I) first heard about Tyler Place when I was looking for a fun place to go on our annual family vacation, with the stipulation in place that this place could not under any circumstances be in Florida. (This was way, way before the oil spill, I started making arrangements last fall, so that's not the reason. It's just that every other family vacation we've ever taken has been in Florida because it's cheap and close by and Mickey Mouse lives there. So, NO FLORIDA.)

I also was looking for a place where Joe and I would get a chance to spend some time together. One unfortunate effect of having two parents who work long hours is that while we can for the most part swap who's working late which nights (we schedule and trade and do what it takes so that one of us will always be home to at least bathe the kids and put them to bed), what ends up happening is that when one of us is home, usually the other is not. So there are many weeks where outside of nights and weekends (even those are dodgy, depending on whether or not one of us is on call) we really don't see each other very much. Obviously not ideal, but for now, it's how it has to be.




Tyler Place seemed like it would really fit the bill. First of all, it's in Vermont, which, unless my American public school education has totally failed me, I'm pretty sure is not in Florida. Secondly, it was billed as some sort of family mecca, a place where overstressed parents and kids of all ages could come for a week to unwind, relax, and be entertained both together and apart. See, a big selling point of Tyler Place is that it's like some kind of mega-camp for kids and for adults. Kids have activities all day long. Even baby kids (like Mack) are assigned personal sitters that take them on outings and engage them in activities in the mornings and the evenings, feeding them all meals and taking care of their every whim from dusk 'til dawn.




Meanwhile, parents are also encouraged to take advantage of the camp-like atmosphere and basically do everything that you would want to do if you didn't have your damn kids hanging off you every second of the day. Other people snoozed in hammocks, took art classes, went on hikes, did yoga, took day trips to Montreal, what have you. (Note I said other people. I'm getting to that part.) Food and drinks are all included in the resort fee, as are all the activity expenses. Normally, I think such a trip would probably fall outside our vacation budget (not only the expense of such all-inclusive chicanery, but also factoring in the cost of flying our carcasses in there, etcetera), but the week I chose, the week of Memorial Day, was something like 50% off the peak-season price range. Which seemed strange to me, because come on, Memorial Day, but then I realized why:




Sweaters in June. Hello Vermont, you are truly the snowy north.

People love this place, did I mention that? They love it. There are people there who have been coming there every year for the past five, six, seven years, people who plan their whole yeararound their annual trip to Tyler Place, people who have made lifelong friendships from these summers in Vermont. And it is very nice. There were some things that we liked a lot. First of all, the food and drink really were superb, and the accomodations were simple but comfortable. The childcare staff was excellent--they were so thoughtful, you could tell they really liked the kids, and scads of them had these charming British and Australian accents. The waterfront was gorgeous, with plenty of activities for the enthusiast. And of course there was Cal's favorite part, which is that you get your own bike the day you check in, that you're encouraged to ride everywhere on the grounds. He was one of the youngest kids there who was riding a two-wheeler, a realization that was, for him, one of the highlights of the entire trip.




The problem? The problem was that every time I would drop Cal and Mack off at their respective clubhouses for a day filled with organic local foods and swimming and treasure hunts and poking other babies in the eye, I felt terrible. Terrible. I felt like a terrible parent. Here we were, working such long hours in our regular lives, only to come on vacation--come on a family vacation--only to dump our kids off so that someone else can have fun with them? This felt sad. Every time after we dropped off the kids, Joe and I didn't know what to do. Did we want to go on a hike? No. Did we want to go take an archery lesson? No. Did we want to join in on the watercolor course on the sundeck? I got paints at home, dude. Did we want to take a Zumba class? OK, now you're not even speaking English anymore.

However, did we want to tiptoe up to the kid's clubhouse and peek in through the window like creeps, making sure that Cal was having fun in his group? Yes indeedy do!




The fact of it is that it might not have been quite the right kind of structure for our kind of family vacation. We probably could have used something a little more free-form, and that's my fault for not realizing that. But I kind of started to feel like there was something wrong with me. Because the other parents were enjoying themselves so much. They loved having all those child-free hours, taking advantage of all the adult-only activities. (It kind of sounds like I'm talking about secret sex parties when I say "adult-only activities," but I'm more referring to doubles tennis and karaoke night.) They were participating in everything. Joe and I were just worriedly wringing our hands, pretending to play Scrabble at the inn while checking our watches obsessively until it was time to collect our offspring. We felt like we were wasting our vacation time without them.




The thing is when you work long hours, and have been working long hours since your children have been born, when your kids say "I want to spend time with you" it is very, very difficult not to feel terrible about pushing them away. Of course they want to do stuff with us. They're our kids. We're their parents. The last thing we want to do is come on a family trip and feel like we're pawning them off on other people to take care of.

Cal did do some of the activities with his group, but we pulled him out of "camp" for as many days as he was in it, using the time that Mack was in his group to do some special activities with Cal that we wouldn't be able to do with the baby in tow. (Which is basically everything.) And that's not to say that Cal didn't enjoy the activities with his group either. In particular, he loved "Pirate Night," a evening where they took all the four and five-year olds on a pontoon boat out to this little island and staged a pirate battle after which booty was reclaimed and distributed amongst the slack-jawed children. (The booty was candy and plastic bedazzled trinkets. Cal got a ridiculous green jeweled ring, which he very earnestly showed us, told us he intended to use as his ring "when he got married," and proceeded to wear to bed.)

I don't mean it to sound like we didn't have fun at Tyler Place, because really, we did, and the people there were so gracious and lovely that I feel like a shitheel for even sounding like I'm complaining when really, it was a wonderful family trip. But I work a lot of hours in my non-vacation life, and I miss my kids when I'm not with them. And though one of the highlights of the week for me was the opportunity to have dinner every night in a dining room with other adults, putting food into my own mouth with a fork as opposed to fielding projectile food particles while getting up from the table thirty thousand times to fetch another glass of milk/napkin/clean spoon/change of pants--there were points that week where I missed that too. So clearly, I am insane.

In sum: Vermont was pretty. We had fun. I felt guilty for every moment that I was not with my children. I will grow up to be a creepy and socially inappropriate mom who tags alongside her full-grown sons, insisting shrilly that they give their mother a kiss, what was that look for, DON'T YOU LOVE ME?




The end.

(Full photo set here.)

in which i prattle on until the clock runs out

You guys are clever. Thanks for all the e-mails. Though the overwhelming consensus was that the original title ("SCUTMONKEY") was the crowd favorite, I think I have reached Kubler-Ross' fifth stage in accepting that this in all likelihood will never pass muster as a marketable title to the masses, no matter how much I want it to. Which, you know, I guess I can understand, even though I feel like I've been immersed in the culture of medicine so long that there are certain things that I really can't believe aren't part of the layman's vernacular. (I encountered this a lot when I was editing the manuscript, may parts where my editor circled one thing and underlined another as being too "jargon-y," and I was like, "What do you mean? Doesn't everyone know what it means when I say we 'ordered a set of coags'? People say that in real life, right? RIGHT?" Ah, what a learning experience this has been.)

My new favorite, suggested by my agent, is PRACTICE. See, because of the double meaning, the practice of medicine as well as the dress rehearsal aspect of so much of medical training. Also, PRACTICE is pithy, which I like. There will be a secondary title under it, which we are also still hashing out (something like, "PRACTICE, Or: How I Went to Med School, Had a Baby, and Grew Up to Become a Real Doctor") but we will see what we come up with in the end. I want to make sure that it conveys some sense of levity, you know? There are enough serious as all hell medical memoirs out there, I want it to be clear that this is not one of them. But hey, what the hell do I know. Dammit, Jim, I'm a doctor, not a...[insert whatever you call someone who is in charge of marketing].

(Pretend I did not just make a Star Trek reference right there.)

Moving on from this...

So due to some glitch in scheduling (I call it a glitch for lack of a better word, but really, the fact of it is that someone needed to trade a few calls with me and I said yes) I am on night call five out of the seven days this week. Monday, Wednesday, FridaySaturdaySunday. You're welcome. One of my older partners seemed scandalized that I was working so many nights (he thought it was inhumane), but then he asked me how old I was. I told him that I was thirty-one. "You can do it then," he nodded sagely. "You're still strong." I thought that was kind of funny.

Anyway, round two was Wednesday night, and it was fine. One other thing that I missed about taking night call (hark ye, residents, the upside of working nights! Take it from someone who has not taken call for a year and a half--there is an upside) is that the pace of the hospital in the evenings and overnight is much different. Working in the ORs during the day is like...OK, imagine that you're a decathlete, only instead of doing the events one at a time, you're doing all ten events simultaneously. Picture, if you will, doing the pole vault while flinging a shot putt and winging a javelin all while jumping hurdles. That's what it's like during the day. At night, at least after, oh, say, 7:00pm, at least you get to space out your events, or at least only do them two or three at a time. So that's better.

The down side, of course, is that I don't get to see anyone. Post-call days off enable me to spend time with the baby (who, incidentally, not so much a baby anymore--Mack just turned one last week, oh hell, here's an obligatory picture to break things up:

I know his hair is too long, because the plumber that came by yesterday to fix out broken garbage disposal waved at him and said, "Hello, little girl!" But I am loathe to cut it, mostly because I know that I'm going to mess it up like that time I tried to cut Cal's hair when he was a baby and he ended up looking like The Littlest Stooge.)

What was I saying? Oh yes, post-call day enables me to spend time with the baby, and I even got to drop by Cal's school to have lunch one day (there is an open lunch invitation for all parents, but in a year and a half I've only been able to do this one other time. The guilt was compounded by the fact that Cal was so excited to see me at school "just like all the other parents" that he basically ate lunch with only one hand, with the other hand a vise around my knee in case I decided to run away mid-sandwich). But I don't get to see Joe that much. So that's bad. However, the weekend is upon us, and while I am on call nights, I at least have the days free to do whatever manner of family-bonding activity we can muster. Which, honestly, will probably involve chasing the kids around while firing little Morse code missives to each other in between calamities. Ah, marriage with children. It can be difficult, as Al Bundy would attest.

Anyway, have to go get ready for work now. Round three...fight!

unorthodox, but grateful nonetheless

I got my first driver's license a little more than a month ago. I KNOW. However, since then, I have driven to and from work every single day, and even though I don't really know how to go anywhere else and I get really nervous whenever I have to deviate from that home-work-home route, I'm kind of getting used to driving. This is a big step for me, as every time got behind the wheel even two or three months ago would have me shaking with white-knuckled terror. I can even change lanes on the highway now without activating my fight or flight response. I am becoming a normal person.


MICHELLE
I wouldn't say it's enjoyable, but driving is becoming...satisfying. You know, like any other repetitive, habituated behavior.

JOE
(Brightly)
Like pooping!

(Long pause)

MICHELLE
No...not like pooping.


I used to not even be able to hold a conversation while I was driving (truth be told--I still don't like to talk when I'm driving somewhere that I'm not familiar) but at least with my commute to and from work, I recently progressed to being able to listen to the radio--the soft rock station only at first, until it started to drive my slowly insane--and now I am comfortable enough that I can listen to my podcasts* again. I can actually listen to other people having a conversation, concentrate on the conversation, and not veer off the road. Do you know what a big deal this is? It is. It is a very big deal.

I AM THIRTY-ONE YEARS OLD AND I JUST GOT MY FIRST DRIVER'S LICENSE.

So anyway, I can drive now is all I have to say. And I drove my kids around (twice!) when Joe wasn't around and we had to get somewhere and I had no other choice, and we all lived! Even though I had to tell Cal don't talk to Mommy while she's driving the car


CAL
Why?

MICHELLE
Because I have to concentrate.

CAL
What's "concentrate" mean?

MICHELLE
Concentrate means when you have to think hard about something.

CAL
Why do you have to think hard?

MICHELLE
Because...shh. Shhh. I just do, just...shhh.

CAL
Mom, why did you say "Shh?"

MICHELLE
Cal, don't talk to Mommy while she's driving!

CAL
But Mom, you're not driving.

MICHELLE
Well, I'm in the car, sitting behind the steering wheel.

CAL
(Pityingly)
But it's a red light.

MICHELLE
That's it, no more talking forever.


Um...Happy Thanksgiving!


* I used to only have the "This American Life" podcast to fall back on, but as of late I am in love with "Jordan Jesse Go!" because it is funny and I don't want to be depressed about the war in Afghanistan or teenage runaway heroin addicts first thing in the morning. If you can suggest any other similar funny podcasts, please advise. (I am trying to get the comments section back online but it has been disabled for so long that I kind of don't know how to do it. Bear with me.)

just desserts

Am I supposed to feel like a loser when people ask me what we're doing for Thanksgiving and I have nothing to tell them? Nothing. We are doing nothing for Thanksgiving. We're probably going to pop over to a friend's for lunch (they live about a block down the street), but aside from that, we don't have family in town nor are we planning to cook anything elaborate, and I have to work on Friday anyway, so even the four-day weekend aspect of the holiday has lost its impact. Maybe I will make some mashed potatoes for dinner on Thursday. Maybe. But honestly, aside from the spirit of Thanksgiving--reflection, being grateful, time with family etcetera--I don't care much about the machinations of Thanksgiving, the manic preparation and ensuing frenzied cooking in particular. (Right now, somewhere out in Ohio, my mother-in-law has read that last bit and gone blind. But everyone already knows that my housewiffery is not renown, I never prevaricated otherwise.)

But anyway, as mentioned, we are going to a friend's house for Thanksgiving lunch, and as such, I felt obligated to bring something--I offered dessert. This is called "being a good guest." As opposed to showing up empty-handed, eating everything and leaving, I guess. Like I said, I really don't like to cook. In particular I loathe the cleanup but I don't really enjoy the actual cooking along the way, either, although I do it occasionally as it is a means to an end. (The end being eating.) But I have in the past made apple pie, and though the recipe is nothing special or prized (the secret ingredient is LOVE! No actually, it's extra sugar) it usually turns out pretty good and doesn't look terrible, unlike that time that I decided to make tuna casserole not via the Tuna Helper box and the results looked like something died in the pan, and something ate the carcass and then threw it up again. So, apple pie it is. I'm not going crazy or anything, I bought a frozen pie crust from Trader Joe's, but I have real apples and butter and sugar and whatnot to fill it with.

Ever since I mentioned that I am going to make this apple pie, Joe has been after me to pick up a cake from the local bakery to bring with us to Thanksgiving lunch. As this lunch is a rather small affair (it's just going to be our family and their family, and our family will only account for about 25% of the food consumed, as one member is still mostly in the soft solids phase of mastication and the other refuses to eat anything that doesn't taste like breaded chicken with ketchup) I brought up the point that we were already bringing a pie, why would we bring cake and pie? It's like stripes and polka dots, one or the other, am I right? But Joe was weirdly insistent on the cake point, reminding me again and again that we had to go get a cake, bring a cake, buy a cake. After mentioning it for, oh, the tenth time, I began to suspect that possibly the reason that he kept wanting to pick up a cake in addition is because he thought that my apple pie was going to turn out shitty, and that he wanted to have a backup dessert option so that in the event of a last-minute pie fiasco on Thanksgiving Day when everything was closed, we'd have something to bring to lunch aside from a six pack of beer and a half-empty bag of Cheetos.

Well, it didn't matter anyone since neither of us got out of work early enough to get to the bakery before it closed for the holidays. But! I got a festive box (perhaps this is overstating it's decorative value somewhat--but there is a picture of a reindeer on it at least) from Target and have filled it with cookies. I did not make the cookies, but hey, don't ask, don't tell, right? At first I was making an effort to choose cookies that weren't so obviously out of a package (for example, ix-nay on the int ilanos-may) but then as I was unboxing the cookies and fluffing them in their decorative container I noticed that the more fancy chocolate coated of the selection had the words PEPPERIDGE FARM embossed rather vulgarly all over the back end of them, so I guess the gig is up. Anyway, it's not like anyone cares if the treats are from a box or not. Cookies are cookies, and everyone likes cookies. Especially Squanto.

I'm not really sure what my point was when I started writing this entry, except that it was maybe that I am terrible at the mechanics of a traditional American Thanksgiving. The sentiment, however, I am pretty OK at.

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.

all romantical and shit



So, Valentine's Day! How was yours? Ours was fine, if utilitarian--Joe's mom was in town to visit the kids (still feels weird to say that--I can't believe I have kids, plural) and demanded to babysit for us so that we could have Valentine's Day dinner out, though for a variety of reasons, Joe and I decided to call it an early night and were home by 7:30pm. However, it was a good dinner, and certainly more romantic than my original instinct, which was to take the opportunity for some free babysitting and run to the supermarket, because just think HOW EFFICIENTLY we could do our shopping without all the carseats and wrangling and no-you-cannot-buy-that-cereal-it-is-a-rip-off-and-I-don't-care-what-percentage-of-the-profits-goes-towards-saving-the-rainforests. It's these magical moments that make a marriage special.

The flowers, by the way, were from Joe, and very lovely. Before he showed them to me, he warned, "I just want to prepare you, they're a little...Tim Burton-esque," which made it a lovely surprise that they were actually pretty, just ornate and a little gothic (black tulips, twisty vine accents etcetera) as opposed to what I was thinking when he said "Tim Burton-esque," which was, like, a single dead daisy. I expect the flowers will only continue to become more Tim Burton-esque as the week goes by, anyway, due to my habit of never, ever throwing out flowers until they're basically putrefying. I just get so attached is all.

and then he started combing his hair with it like in "the little mermaid"

Hey look, I don't pretend to be Martha Stewart, OK? I can barely cook rice, and as for kitchen tools, the ones we actually use we keep to a minimum. Most of them are from this black plastic set that I think we picked up at Bed Bath and Beyond, that came in a bagged bundled set for, like five bucks. So it is very strange as well as very specific that one of my pet peeves is when people (translation: Joe) use(s) kitchen implements for the wrong purpose. Inexplicably drives me INSANE. And the brunt of the transgressions centers on this one tool:



I don't know what this is, or what it's called, but to my mind, the shape and configuration implies that it is a tool used to pick up and serve pasta of the spaghetti/linguini variety. I mean...right? It has little prongs to entwine the strands and everything. It's a long pasta picker-upper, and due to its unusual shape, that seems like basically the only thing it's suited to do.

However, Joe uses this implement for EVERYTHING. Which is annoying not just because it's difficult to clean, but, see above, using kitchen implements incorrectly drives me crazy, despite the fact that I have no actual proof that pasta-picking is what this implement is actually used for. But people, seriously? HE USES THIS FOR EVERYTHING. Including and not limited to:

• Scooping up rice
• Serving beef stew
• Dishing out soup

I mean, really? SOUP? When it's sitting next to two ladles and a giant serving spoon? And, more saliently, THERE'S A HOLE IN THE MIDDLE OF THAT THING. I mean, Jesus.

snakes on a drain

As I had sort of implied with that earlier post, we have been having some problems with our downstairs toilet. (How weird, to have a "downstairs toilet." How weird to have stairs. Anyway.) Nothing broke per se, the toilet's not overflowing, there's no leak, the toilet just won't flush. I don't know if its a function of water pressure or too much toilet paper or someone's formidable and apparently capacious bowels, but it has been clogged for several days, defying attempts at clearance ranging from flushing again to plunging to The Old Coathanger Trick to being chemically challenged with Drano. At some point, we sort of called the code and Joe suggested that maybe we needed to call a plumber to snake the toilet.

"No!" I insisted, jiggling the coathanger into the toilet's murky depths, "It's fine! Just flush it again!"

Anyway, I called a plumber.

First, I called our building management as a courtesy to ask if there was a preferred plumber that they wanted us to use. However, as with every other occasion that I have called building management for any kind of problem (see also: SILENT BUT DEADLY, when we thought we were being killed by a gas leak from our fireplace), my call went directly to voicemail. Fine, I tried. So I looked online (apparently there is this very informative and useful site called Google.com! Write it down! I'm saying that as a joke but my mom actually e-mailed me once with a note to that very effect--e-mailed it, in fact, to my Gmail account) and found some plumber in our neighborhood that was called something enticing like, "Budget Plumber" or "Affordable Plumber" or whatever, something implying that they were cheap. So I called the economy plumber and explained the problem, asking them if I could make an appointment for them to come by tomorrow. Oh, and by the way, barring any unforseen complexities (a bezoar of toilet paper the size of China, perhaps), how much did they estimate it might cost to clear the blockage?

There was some rustling as the lady looked for her price list. "Well, if it's a simple [hmmm], and there's no [hmmm] to the main [hmmm], as long as the [hmmm] is confined to the [hmmm]..."

(Fifteen minutes of plumbing talk later, she said that it could be around $135.)

A HUNDRED THIRTY FIVE DOLLARS FOR YOUR EXTRA-LONG COAT HANGER POKING? I felt like I was going to have a stroke. But what can you do? It's like calling a consult at the hospital. Sometimes you don't want to go through all the trouble, and it's not anything you couldn't do yourself, but what are you going to do? You need the experts and their special toys. So anyway, they told me that the plumber would be by the next day, between 10am and 2pm (note the convenient and small time frame--that won't fuck up your plans for the day) and hung up.

About an hour later, I got a call back from building management. "Hey, got your message, and yeah, there is a plumber that we like to use who does a lot of work in the building. It's called Super Duper Plumbing [or whatever, I can't remember], here's their number. If you can, be sure to ask for Eric."

"Super Duper. Eric. Got it."

"ERIC!" the building manager repeated, somewhat frantically. She had a real boner for Eric, evidently.

Now, let me ask you this. If your management company has a SPECIAL RELATIONSHIP with a specific plumbing company, if they throw all their business towards this one group, wouldn't you expect that reciprocally, some sort of special discount should be applied for residents of this housing complex? I mean, that's just my understanding of how the world works. You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours. You snake my toilet, I'll...flush yours. I don't know. Stay with me here. I called Super Duper Plumbing, made an appointment, asking for ERIC (they tried to give me Steve instead but I said no way, Corky) and then called back the economy plumber to cancel.

However, after canceling with the first plumber, it occurred to me that I never asked Super Duper Plumbing for an estimate. So I called back, they hemmed and hawed, and fifteen minutes of plumber talk later, they said that at bare minimum, it would probably cost $235.

TWO HUNDRED AND THIRTY FIVE AMERICAN DOLLARS TO SNAKE OUR TOILET. I mean, I know that these are troubled economic times and all, but I was under the impression that numbers still carried some meaning.

So then I cancelled my appointment with them too. And then I was going to call back the first plumber to re-set up the original appointment, but I was too embarrassed, like I had jilted them or something and now I was crawling back on my hands and knees begging them to clear the detritus of our human waste from our poor, pathetic downstairs half-bathroom.

And then Joe got home and asked if the toilet was fixed and I said, "Funny you should ask that," before telling him the whole story about the cheap plumbers and the building manager and Eric and TWO HUNDRED AND THIRTY FIVE DOLLARS!!! Which is why I cancelled their asses!

"TWO HUNDRED THIRTY FIVE DOLLARS?" Joe panicked, completely skipping over the cancelling part. "WE CAN'T AFFORD MANY MORE PROBLEMS LIKE THIS!" This is usually his cue to start his gloom and doom pre-tax season financial projection, which--OK, I know, alright? I know times are tight, and some expenses inopportune, but do you and CNN need to point out how it's the End of Days every single minute!? It's not like I'm over here stuffing fur stoles and hundred dollar bills into the toilet, causing it to clog! I DIDN'T EVEN WANT TO CALL A PLUMBER, WE HAVE TWO OTHER TOILETS THAT ARE WORKING PERFECTLY FINE, I JUST WANTED TO KEEP POKING AT THE TOILET WITH A STICK.

Anyway, we soon realized that while we probably are not qualified to handle the nuances of fixing, say, a cracked water main, or even necessarily a leaky faucet, the act of jamming something down a toilet to break up whatever unspeakable substances are clogging it does not amount to rocket science, and that they sell toilet snakes (or "augers," for you fancy folk out there) at Home Depot for, like, $30. And so...



And now, we can flush our toilet.

(And the point of my telling this story was...what? Hilarious domestic antics? Appreciation for the plumbing arts? The revelation that someone in our house may be taking prodigiously huge shits or using an unholy amount of toilet paper, possibly both? An attempt to sabotage any chance I may have of ever becoming Surgeon General? Take your pick.)