Category Archives: muttering to myself

Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act Update

I have been getting calls, and now collection letters, regarding an unpaid $81 toward a discounted $131 deductible (a savings of $119 over the list price!)  from a quick pre-colonoscopy consultation I was required to have last October.  I’d been told the procedure was fully covered as preventive care, except, apparently for the visit to the gastroenterologist to shake his hand and give his receptionist my $50 copay the week before.  There were also a few hundred in fees, it turns out, because a polyp had been sent to the lab for analysis.  Lab fees, obviously, have nothing to do with the preventive procedure.

“Why am I required to pay $100 by check on the day of the procedure if the procedure is fully covered by the premium I pay every month?” I asked the woman at the hospital.  She didn’t know, but the procedure would not be done without the payment.  I paid.

Fast forward eight months, calls to the insurance company regarding charges, conversations with the doctor’s office.   Eight months of demands and threats and finally another letter from a lawyer who specializes in collection.    My position is that I’ve already paid the $81 in the form of that $100 check nobody can seem to justify.  

Out of the blue, yesterday, another envelope from the hospital.   Without any explanation, a check, written out to me, for $100.

cold breeze in Cyberia

Facebook, which we’re told is indispensable for any business or would-be business, allowed me to quickly set up a page for my would-be business.  I had a kid managing it for a while, then it went fallow for a year or so.  I was able to update it when I wanted, but didn’t do it often.  If I’d managed to whip up excitement among 10,000 followers it would have been much easier to raise money through crowdfunding, but I had a few dozen and the effort of raising its facebook profile felt mostly wasted while I needed to work on so many other things.

I got a notice from Facebook a few months back informing me I wouldn’t be able to manage or administer the page I’d put up unless I signed up for a personal page.  I did this with reluctance and had “friend requests” from a few dozen people, some I’d known decades back.  

A friend request, it strikes me now, is such a poignant thing to call this transaction.   “Will you be my friend?”  cue visual of adorable little bear, bashful and wearing some kind of cute hate.  

Since I’ve set up my personal page I’ve been unable to post on my own business page, despite having done what facebook’s instructions had told me to.  “You do not have permission to do this,” it tells me.  Or, it lets me post something as a visitor, with my own first and last name visible. 

Taking a break from other things, I had an idea for a work around.  Create a new email address “loves to draw” or “dances with voles” and make that person an administrator.   Then “animation rules” could post to the page, instead of me personally, with my birthday 58 years ago also displayed.  It took only a few moments to find the “settings” tab referred to below and I set off to follow these seemingly simple instructions:

How do I give someone a role on my Page?

You’ll need to be an admin to give someone a role on your Page. If you’re an admin:

  1. Click Settings at the top of your Page.
  2. Click Page Roles in the left column.
  3. If the person is your Facebook friend, begin typing their name and select them from the list that appears. If the person isn’t your Facebook friend, type their email address.
  4. Click Admin to select a role from the dropdown menu.
  5. Click Save and enter your password to confirm.

Page Roles never came up on that settings page.  The left column, yes.  The next step I needed to follow?  No.   Must mean I am not an admin.    

Sekhnet, who has never been on facebook, suggested I call someone at facebook for help.   A friend who is active on facebook laughed, as I would too, if I were not busy gathering my coat around my neck as the cool breeze from the Cyberian tundra whips in.

The Case for Madness

A slam dunk, really.

Hire an accountant to do a complicated calculation that needs to be clearly explained to the vulnerable person on the other end of the complication.   The guy compiles three completely different sets of numbers, using incorrect percentages, a useless and confusing chart and an inaccurate letter, addressed to a name he himself has invented, explaining nothing.  $675.  Send an email explaining the problems, asking him to get back to you when tax season’s over.  

Two weeks later: another bill for $675.  Write and mail a letter patiently and concisely explaining the insufficient work and the impossibility of paying the number this fellow has pulled out of his ass.  Wait a month.  A third copy of the same bill arrives.  

“I told you he’s senile,” reassures Sekhnet.

Bills keep arriving for the useless visit to the distracted physician’s assistant.  These bills have been approved by the insurance company pursuant to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, often called Obamacare.  That twenty minutes sitting as the PA asked no relevant questions and cluelessly searched google for a symptom she’d never heard of:  $507, patient’s responsibility.  

“Go talk to the ombudsman, that bill is ridiculous, even if it’s legal,” says Sekhnet.

Your childhood friend, in the role of peacemaker, winds up raging at you.  Now you have to make an appointment to patiently discuss whatever the fuck that was about.

These are, of course, trifles and not arguments for going mad at all.  They are mere annoyances, payable by cash, check or credit card, even for someone on a fixed income.  They may be symptoms, signs of a demanding world grown aggressive, but not, even with ten of their close cousins, arguments for the Laughing Academy.  

The Laughing Academy I’m thinking of, by the way, is not the Ivy League kind where even Freshman can find sexual relief from the staff.   The madness I’m thinking of has no real upside, except the end of trying to make sense of the senseless order of business we are constantly attending to.  And, of course, it’s crazy not to consider the downside of going mad, isn’t it?

You complain that nobody listens to anybody.  It’s like being trapped in that famous one-frame cartoon where the response is “I’m sorry… I wasn’t listening.  Were you saying something?”   Nobody listens to anybody, as a rule.  Just life in our energetic, go-go-go, do ‘im, Sarge, society.  We are too busy achieving, striving, we all have troubles,  here’s a quarter, go call somebody who might actually give three rat’s ass hairs.

You know the deal.  So you take all your time, skill and money, invest in a nonprofit you dream up dedicated to carefully listening to doomed kids, letting them demonstrate their wild creativity.   You’ve never run a business, it’s true, but this one is so needed in the world, so intuitively reasonable, so simple, and it works, can help so many little wretches — how can it not get up and run itself?  

You may not want to know it, brother, but you are more than halfway to the public wing of the Laughing Academy, a smelly subway car you can use as your living room, until the cops eventually take you in for smelling too bad.

I still take a shower everyday, and shave five or so times a week, but the case for madness, never weak to begin with, is becoming stronger by the day.   I can feel it dribbling a basketball on my skull sometimes, angling for a circus shot.  I imagine it, at the buzzer, soaring over the distracted seven-footers between it and the basket, and while they check their smart phones, slamming the rock through the net as time runs out.   

“Game time!” it whoops, harmonizing maniacally with the sound of the buzzer.

America, America

I must find something to occupy me more productively during the long working day. Come home after work too tired to think, with a feeling of accomplishment or even just relief to be done, get a paycheck.   This unpaid uphill life I’m living is too challenging.  

Having a simple, self-evident and overdue idea: that kids in trouble need to be listened to, need to be allowed to play, make creative and editorial decisions in relation to their learning — testing it a hundred times, watching it succeed everywhere — what the hell is that balanced against its failure to thrive, against the vast landscape of intolerable annoyances that can only truly be surmounted by unqualified success, or, in the meantime, a dedicated spiritual practice or an all-consuming job?  That it might well help every child it touches?  Succeed against the odds or shut the fuck up, loser.  

Why for example get worked up about the details of the new trade bill President Obama is trying to fast track through Congress?   Up or down vote, you don’t need to debate the details, it’s bipartisan.  

Personally, I have other things to worry about, like the $507 bill for last month’s twenty minute session with the Nurse Practitioner ($180) and a blood test ($327).  I have to take a walk and arrange a meeting with an ombudsman or patient advocate at Columbia Doctors, see how far I can negotiate it down to a reasonable number.

“Sir, $327 for a blood test IS a reasonable number, approved by Empire Blue Cross under the terms of the PPACA, as is $180 for a consultation with a medical professional who, arguably, should not have been on Google perplexedly searching for ‘pink mucas’ for the bulk of your short meeting, shouldn’t have offered to do a rectal exam she knew — when asked– would tell her nothing, and who should probably have asked about your recent diet, stress, changes in life, exercise, sleep and so forth instead of just making a referral to a specialist– particularly since the questions she didn’t ask turned out to be keys to solving your bowel problems, as you did on your own. But your bill has been negotiated on your behalf and approved by the insurance company and is legal, mandatory and collectible under the PPACA.  If you have a problem with it, talk to your congressman.  You owe us $507 and since you have insurance your argument about being treated as uninsured, and allowed the discount we often give to such patients, is flatly absurd.  Unless you’d like the bill turned over to our debt collector, like many before it, pay it now.  How would you like to pay, cash, check or credit card?”

I don’t know, for the life of me, why I’m not making a call now to make arrangements to have that fun discussion instead of tapping here.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement is no doubt a massive and complicated bill.   The president gets hot when he’s accused of keeping it secret.  It is not secret, he insists, any member of Congress can make an appointment to go read it.  They simply may not bring staffers with them, may not photocopy any part of it or remove it from the restricted reading room, may not make notes or discuss its terms with anybody with clearance who hasn’t seen it.  That’s what fast-track means, up or down vote — “yes” or “no”– there’s no need for debate.  Plenty of Republicans are already on board to vote “yes”.  What the hell is the problem with the liberal wing of the president’s own party?

Maybe it’s the lack of public debate?  I don’t know.  Secrecy, and even semi-secrecy, has a bad smell in a democracy where an informed electorate is supposed to be involved in the decisions made on its behalf.  We all know this is a bit of a myth, but still, secrecy is a slap in the voters’ faces, and it smells bad.  

When Vice President Cheney and President Bush could not stall the 9/11 Commission beyond November 2002, they set conditions for speaking to the commission. They would go before the commission together, not be sworn to tell the truth, nor would they testify, no notes, no recordings, everybody on the commission was sworn to keep whatever they said secret.   Struck me as a deal a couple of mafia dons would make, if they owned the court system and the police force.  Sunlight is the best disinfectant for abuses of democracy, as well as hateful free speech, except, apparently, when it shines into the dark side where it doesn’t belong.  Some things are best kept secret from a skittish electorate that can’t handle the truth, is the theory.

Think of the stink that would have engulfed us if the enhanced interrogation program had not been kept secret, except for those members of a Congressional committee who got restricted access to secret memos, after agreeing, under the penalties for treason, not to disclose their classified contents. The memos, it turns out, justified everything by arguing that each enumerated torture technique was not torture if a doctor was present to make sure death did not result from it.  Imagine the outrage if the public had been let in on the details of that program!

We’re just finding out now about guys hung by chains naked, submerged in ice water, kept in cages half the size of a coffin, kept awake for days on end, in cold, and heat, and menaced by snarling dogs, and look how pissed off some of us feel.  Imagine if we’d known while it was being systematically done to hundreds, or possibly thousands, of suspected bad men held without charges in secret prisons scattered around the globe?  Imagine if we’d known that $81,000,000 in taxpayer dollars had been paid to two rogue psychologists to oversee this controversial, failed experiment in counter-terrorism?

The Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement  has at least one provision that some people will get upset about, rightly or wrongly.   I don’t know how we know about this provision, since the contents of the trade agreement have never been made public, but nobody seems to be denying that this is one of its provisions.  Ah, I see some traitor has apparently leaked a section of it, to Wikileaks, natch.

Corporations whose profit expectations have been diminished or damaged by laws or regulations of member states will be able to sue those state, local or federal governments, in special Investor-State Dispute Settlement tribunals.  The judges in these tribunals will be lawyers who have experience in the area the corporation works in, be familiar with the nuances of their profit expectations.   Many will have, without a doubt, worked for, or even still work for, these corporations.

“But it’s the same with the Security and Exchange Commission,” you will argue, correctly.  “The government lawyers there charged with catching financial shenanigans are the minor leaguers, the best of whom will get to work for the corporations they regulate for many times their government salary.  That’s the world, why be a weak little whiny bitch about it?  Make some money, you’ll feel better.”

The conspiracy theorists among us imagine the worst.  Alarmists and weaklings, one and all.  After all, NAFTA turned out fine.  And the draft provision for the Investor-State Dispute Settlement tribunals (see linked Washington Post article) includes, ironically, clear transparency rules, requiring that all cases brought under the TPP must be public.

The enhanced interrogation program, or torture program, if you’re being a pain-in-the-ass stickler for accuracy, even though it was far more extensive than admitted, even though evidence of some of the more medieval abuses was deliberately destroyed, even though it must be admitted that little or no actionable intelligence resulted from this widespread, systematic trampling on decades of evolving human rights law and the anti-torture treaties we championed, well, no harm no foul.  You can understand the need to keep that kind of shit top secret, just look at the harm the after-the-fact revelations have been doing.

Barack Obama is a good man, a brilliant and witty man.  He’s a funny, cool guy with everyone’s best interests at heart.  If he says this bill needs to be fast-tracked, who is a nation of obstructionist ignoramuses to say no?   Finally he has a truly bipartisan bill he’s trying to sign into law and stubborn members of the president’s own party are standing in his way.  Many Americans hate him simply because his father was African and, under the time-honored American code of racism, he is considered a black man.   I rest my case.  Fast track this shit.  Father knows best.

“Get a job, you bum!” a witty fan yells at the ump.

To Prove I Was Not Depressed

To prove to someone who loves me and worries about me that I was not depressed, I made a doctor’s appointment I had been putting off making.  

My ailment was digestive, or rather, excretory, and had not been particularly terrible, but was a change for the worse and had persisted for a few weeks.  She kept urging me to see a doctor, rather than find out, God forbid, I had colon cancer only after the disease had too firm a foothold to dislodge.  Since I kept mentioning it, she kept reminding me, with mounting exasperation, that I should see a doctor.

My doctor was on vacation, but his nurse practitioner would be able to see me fairly soon.   My experience with this woman was mixed, she was defensive, short-tempered and had a wavering attention span.  She asked questions and did not listen all the way through the answer.   She scolded and defended herself instead of cutting to the chase and solving the problem.   I’d felt very mature overlooking what an unlikable person she could be on a previous visit.  My gut told me not to bother with her, but my gut was also giving me problems the internet had no ready answers about.  

In any case, I knew my doctor would probably only refer me to a gastroenterologist.  One of my hesitations of getting involved with doctors was paying unknowable fees of hundreds of dollars to a referring doctor, and even more to a specialist, to have a series of diagnostic tests I’d also have to pay for “out of pocket” though I pay a premium to an insurance company every month.

I purchase Obamacare, a small, deeply flawed step towards controlling health care costs and lessening the unconscionable number of Americans who die for lack of affordable health care.  One frustration of this Great Compromise is that a consumer can’t find out the price of an office visit until the office she or he visits submits a bill to the private health insurance company.  The insurance company sends a copy of the claim to the patient and informs the doctor’s office of the negotiated rate and the patient gets a bill.  I have a folder full of these bills, many of which I am not responsible to pay, some of which are in collection against me.  The difficulty of finding out which I owe and which I don’t is a vexation that is bad for the health of everyone effected by this complicated private health insurance law.

The nurse practitioner spent much of our twenty minute meeting searching the internet for information on an odd symptom I had already researched: pink mucus.  She meticulously typed in every aspect of our conversation for her on-line records but, although bowel conditions are often effected by such things, never asked about changes in diet, circumstance, stress, sleep, mood.  She had never heard of pink mucus in the stool.   She was concerned that she’d never heard of this.  

“Shall I do a rectal exam to see if you have a hemorrhoid?” she asked.

“Would an external hemorrhoid cause this symptom?” I asked.  

“No,” she answered, “but an internal hemorrhoid might.”  

“Would your exam be able to tell you if I had an internal hemorrhoid?” I asked.  

“No,” she admitted.  I declined her invitation for a rectal exam.  My rectum was already fairly sore, in any case, inflamed, in fact.  She advised me to use soft, moist wipes instead of toilet paper and sent me for a blood test.

She had no other advice whatsoever, except to get to a GI doctor ASAP.  I reminded her I’d had a recent colonoscopy (a “fully covered” preventive service they are still billing me for…) and that it was therefore unlikely that I’d developed a serious condition in a matter of months.   I also knew, from my research, that diagnosing bowel trouble was a matter of ruling out a number of conditions and a likely diagnosis of IBS which is famously triggered by stress.  

I was also not looking forward to paying hundreds of dollars to have these things ruled out.  In any case, it didn’t feel like an emergency situation and the symptoms had not become any worse over those weeks.

A snippy phone message arrived two days after the visit urging me to get to the specialist ASAP.  A couple more snippy messages followed, one informed me there was an inflammation shown on the blood work.  Each message urged me to go see the specialist ASAP.   I’d been out of phone range, upstate, and didn’t get these until I got back to the city.  I called the office a few days later and had a copy of my blood test results sent to me.  They were mostly within the normal range and arrived without any accompanying comments.

Punchline # 1:  consciously changed my sloppy diet back to a more regular high fiber one, got some more physical exercise, completed some challenging work that had been dogging me, got a few nights of decent sleep: pink mucus and other symptoms gone, problem solved.

Punchline #2:  bill from Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act for twenty minute visit to distracted nurse practitioner, plus three scolding voice mails: $180.  

Everybody’s got to make a living.  God bless America, y’all.

Paul Krugman chimes in

It is now generally admitted, most recently by the brother of former President George W. Bush,  that the decade long Iraq war was a wrong-headed trillion dollar disaster (that killed and permanently disabled tens of thousands and displaced millions).   Now, we are told again, by a profit hungry media eager to get on to the next sponsored event, to simply move on.

Not so fast.  Here’s Paul Krugman, jumping in with some intelligent points worth making.   At least from my constantly griping point of view.

FaceBook friends

I saw the movie about the invention of, and legal battles over, faceBook when it came out.  I believed the portrait of a smart, angry, now billionaire Harvard nerd initially motivated by revenge on a girl who turned him down.  I left the movie house feeling confirmed in my mostly queasy insights into the heart of the alienating thing called Social Media.  

There are excellent and handy uses for social media, it can’t be denied.  But having pages where we post things about ourselves (he said silently, writing the words on a page where he posts things about himself) with the aim of becoming the coolest and most popular kid in virtual high school by amassing the most disembodied avatar friends?  An invitation to the illusion of intimacy and friendship with virtually none of the risks or rewards.

I know a tortured soul, a brilliant guy who has survived untreated bulimia for decades, with literally thousands of friends on faceBook.  When he leaves his computer and walks on the street, you can see loneliness radiating off him like spokes of despair around a downtrodden comic book character.  He’s a classic case, no doubt.   I’m sure there are many otherwise well-adjusted, self-loving people with robust social lives, friends they talk to, have dinner with, laugh and cry with in person, friends they’d leap into traffic to help out of a tight spot, who casually maintain faceBook pages and have many faceBook friends who are not bravely posing portraits of alienated desperation.

Here’s what got me thinking about faceBook today.  I was forced by the marketing arm of fezBook, now energetically monetizing itself as all great things in our society must, to create a personal page in order to continue maintaining my wehearyou.net student-run animation page.  Reluctantly, seeing that they’d made good on their threats not to allow me to post things to the business site I’d created, I set up a personal page.  

I put up one recent photo of two goats kissing a demurely smiling young man and left my own avatar a dashing grey silhouette with a shock of Conan-like hair coming to a jaunty soft-serve ice cream cone point at the top. At least that’s my memory of my avatar.  Good to have my hair back, I thought idly.

Literally one minute after I put up the page I had my first friend request.  Within hours a small flurry of friend requests from people I’d be glad to be friends with: in real life.  There were several from people I’d never heard of, faceBook friends of the two actual people I’d friended at first.  

I wrote a personal email to each person I otherwise knew explaining that I wouldn’t be active on facebook, had set up the personal page as a requirement for continuing to run my business page.  I asked each how they were, hoped they were doing well.  Told each one that I’d be happy to be in contact.  I noted that my “likes” on the kids’ animation page had oddly fallen from 92 to 87 in recent months and that I was trying to get to 100.  I asked them to please click the link and “like” the animation page.  You can do that here, if you like, dear reader, and afterwards, for a more fun experience, pop over here.

Alas, though predicable, of the dozen or so who asked me to become fezBag friends, only one clicked the link and liked the page.  She also sent me an email saying “Done.  Like these links, if you like,” and sent me two links to her pages to like.  Quid pro quo, fair is fair, like and like, done, and it took me about 15 seconds.   None of the others I’d emailed wrote back.   Perhaps I’d violated the first rule of Social Media– nothing personal!   So much for being friends on faceBarf, I thought, folding one half of my face into a Popeye-like smirk.

Truly, I prefer to talk to Siri.  At least you can have something like a conversation with that adorable robot.  She actually tries to respond to what you say; when she’s stumped she’ll say “wait, I don’t understand.”   That statement is one of the most intelligent and currently under used replies in human interaction.   It shows, in very short order, that you are trying to understand.  No small feat.  

It’s not hard to imagine from Siri’s enthusiastic, sometimes whimsical replies, that she has a cute little personality and, if not smart as an actual whip, is smart as a virtual whip and a better friend than people who reach out to be friends with no strings attached and can’t be troubled to click a link to perform the smallest of kindnesses to a potential facebook pal.

Communist

Back before free markets ruled the world, before freedom was on the march everywhere, before we all enjoyed the true, universal democratic freedom afoot in the world today, there was a serious debate over the most just way to organize societies.   This debate goes back centuries, to the earliest times.  It was formally ended  by Ronald Reagan, already possibly demented, when he caused the Russian Communists to tear down the Berlin Wall, ending the Cold War between Capitalism (freedom) and Communism (repression).

During what’s known as the Enlightenment in Europe, after dim centuries of monkish superstition and misery, the lives of human individuals were put at the center of the debate.  For the first time inalienable natural rights were discussed– the rights to life, liberty and, in Jefferson’s felicitous phrase– the pursuit of happiness.  

Rhetorical phrases are just that, and how ironic or accurately descriptive they are depends on experience down here on the ground where most of us are compelled to live.  “Freedom on the March” means something different to those stirred by their president declaring it and those who find themselves homeless and orphaned, lives trampled by the boots of their liberators as freedom, not always graceful, marches in.  

But I am hopped up, trying to motivate myself somehow to get on with my day.  A thought, then, and into my work:

My grandmother grew up in a town in the Ukraine where Jews were treated harshly for centuries.   Two decades after she left all the Jews in her town were murdered, some slowly, the rest shot and left in a ravine in the summer of 1943.  When she was a teenager in Vishnevitz, for a brief period, the Russian Revolution brought the promise of freedom, equality and inalienable rights in the form of Communists on horseback, with machine guns mounted on carts, with books and organizers and the burning idea of shaking off centuries of murderous repression.  A bright girl, she seized on this hopeful dream and was, for the rest of her life, in spirit if not in actual party membership, a Communist.

Your grandma was a fucking Commie, you will say.  Yes, I will reply, and she was not wrong.  There was once a debate about the most just way to organize human affairs.  Karl Marx, whatever virtues and flaws were in his idealistic system, underestimated one thing: the fatal resolve of Capitalism.   Regarding the famous apocryphal Lenin quote that capitalists will sell you the rope to hang them with, they will.  Right after they’ve poisoned the last drop of water you will drink to wet your whistle after doing the sweaty deed.

Honor Anemia

The man who made the case that many in our society suffer from Honor Anemia was himself a highly respected member of our civic society.   He was treated with deference in restaurants he frequented and he always handled this attention with smiling graciousness.   It seemed strange that the theory about people craving respect was his, but here it is:

We live in a society where many people feel disrespected.  They crave the honor of being treated fairly, recognized for their efforts, they suffer greatly from the lack of it.  If you give somebody a title, special recognition, it goes a long way.   Honor anemia can only be palliated by giving honor of some kind.

Dale Carnegie noted the same thing a century earlier, if you want to make friends and influence people, and sell things to them or get them to do you favors, you need to make them feel appreciated and important.   Carnegie, and my friend decades later, noted it and it will be noted again, as the lack of respect many people feel is a major cause of anger, depression and violence.   Anger, depression and violence– aren’t those really phases of the same thing?  

We live in a culture where the bottom line more and more requires the individual to be placed on hold, thanked for patience he doesn’t have, forced to talk to robots, get calls from recordings asking him to press numbers so he can get in line to speak to a human who will give him shit about something, usually a bill.   We live in a culture organized on the myth of the free individual and his inalienable rights, yet very few get to be treated as unique individuals.   Much suffering flows from this anonymizing of most of us.

“You think too much, you write too much and you’re giving me a head ache.  Would you do me the honor of shutting the fuck up, please, at least while I bolt this crappy, high-fat, low-nutrition fast food dinner I’m trying to get down?”

“Of course, sir, my bad.”

If You Have Nothing Good To Say About Someone

“say nothing,” my mother always said.   Actually, that’s not true.  She may have said it once.  At any rate, not as often as she said things about people when she had nothing good to say about them.    If you would look for a real conversation with people over the internets*, I’d suggest you find something else to do.   Banging your head against the wall, in my opinion, is probably a better use of your time.  

Think of it, in an actual conversation, much of the time the odds don’t favor a meaningful chat– each person will talk about what excites or concerns them, or just as often what annoys or perplexes them, and if there is a back and forth, beyond this mutual telling of stories, that’s a big plus and a conversation to remember.   In writing, unless you are writing to another writer– and even then, the odds are against you — you can often forget about hearing much connected to what you were discussing.  If you curse, insult or use CAPS to browbeat the person you will sometimes get an aggrieved and defensive direct response, but, all things considered, this is not a useful strategy for having a productive conversation with someone.    Better to do almost anything else, including posting random thoughts and opinions in cyberspace.

I remember my friends’ bright, precocious daughter, at about age six, annoyed by her younger cousins at a family gathering, bursting out with “I hate those fucking little bastards!” and stomping out of the room.  My friend took his little girl aside and with infinite tenderness told her he understood that her little cousins were probably frustrating to hang around with, but that they bothered her because they loved her and wanted to be with her.   She stuck to her position that she hated them, but left open the possibility that she might soften her position.  I recall being very impressed that my friend didn’t even mention the language, he went straight, and compassionately, to why the girl was angry.  

But I have to say, I’m with the girl here, particularly lately.


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* As former president George Dubya Bush styled it