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…but my father is in the hospital in Missouri with what, at last pass by various specialists, looks like it might be a heart defect. They’re supposed to be running tests today.

He feels a lot better than when he went into the ER on Saturday night, but they want to keep him for at least several more days, probably, to run tests. The hematologist who was brought in yesterday does not think his problem is Factor V Leiden (my clotting disorder), although there is evidence of (long) past clot-related damage. They did an EKG that came back clean, but apparently the possible defect is of the sort that wouldn’t show up on an EKG anyway.

This is interesting, because I actually complained about chest pains to my GP last year and got an EKG of my own. She was basically humoring me; she kept telling me that I probably just couldn’t tell the difference between chest pains and muscle aches from weight-lifting, which I found insulting, but the EKG came back clean, so despite the fact that I’ve had these pains intermittently at least since college I figured it couldn’t be that bad.* I guess if Dad has a Super Sekrit heart defect I’ll need to get rechecked.

My mother was not too happy when I mentioned this.

“You had CHEST PAINS and you never MENTIONED them to me?”
“Gee, I wonder why… The EKG was fine! They said I was fine! I feel fine!”

Mom called to update me just as I was leaving the grocery store; I arrived home to discover a letter from the UW Benefits Office, forwarded from Boston, informing me that they were canceling my health insurance effective TODAY because the premiums had not been paid. This should definitely not have happened, since the standard practice is to take the entire summer’s premiums out of the May check for grad students who have a fall appointment, which I do, but apparently–the benefits office returned my frantic voicemail at 6:35 this morning–nobody authorized this for me. No one really knows why.** They’re supposed to call me back either this afternoon or tomorrow morning.

I strongly hope that there are no further difficulties in resolving this, since I may need to get a freaking cardiologist when I get back to Madison. Not to mention a new GP–even if I don’t have a heart defect, this is also the woman who told me that I should never, under any circumstances, consume more than one alcoholic beverage in a 24-hour period and then strongly implied that I was an alcoholic. It was like she’d never seen a graduate student before.

The good news: my honorary nieceling Abby, who is almost 5 and who fell down a flight of stairs this weekend and suffered a fractured skull and subdural bleeding, has just been discharged from the children’s medical center in St. Louis. They have a follow-up appointment next month and a list of symptoms for which to keep an eye out, but this morning’s CAT scan showed that the injury has started healing (it was a long slow bleed, which is why they kept them for three days). Abby is very relieved that they will not be shaving her head for surgery and apparently is enjoying telling people that she broke her first bone: her skull.

Despite having been confined to a hospital bed, Abby never really showed many symptoms (it’s a good thing my friend Laura, her mother, took her to the ER, obviously), and she was definitely getting pretty bored. Laura said that last night she pressed the call button to summon a nurse and then demanded that her Care Bear’s blood pressure be checked. In case you were wondering, a Care Bear’s systolic BP should be under 50. Bedtime Bear is a healthy 35.

I hope they actually figure out what’s wrong with Dad today.

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*You’d think I’d have known better by then. Constant vigilance, that’s how you have to deal with the medical profession.

**Although let’s just say that this is not the first benefits SNAFU that I have experienced through my department in the past couple of years.

I have failed Science. I am very sorry.

You may recall that recently I claimed that I would redye my hair with Manic Panic in place of my preferred Special Effects and report on its performance, in the interest of Humanity and Science.*

But then I talked to several people who were all very discouraging on the subject of Manic Panic’s long-lastingness vis-a-vis Special Effects, and I got antsy, and ended up going to the mall in Santa Clara for the express purpose of finding a Hot Topic** so that I could get my brand. Special Effects is good stuff, okay?

So I’ve redyed my hair, and it is very vibrant, and currently in the stage where it comes off on everything–fortunately, my cousin, whom I will be visiting this weekend, says she has plenty of ratty pillowcases. So I figured, I’ll throw Science a bone: I didn’t use the Manic Panic, but I can post a photo of my hair after every shampoo, documenting the Special Effects fading process, although you should know that I use special anti-fading shampoo and shit. I take my hair seriously. It brings joy to small children, as evidenced by the most recent letter I received from my friend Laura’s 4-year-old daughter:***

Do you still have pink hair, or is it purple now?

I want purple, no, rainbow hair. Like green and purple and red. Oh, not that. That would be too pretty. How about red hair, and a tail and a seashell bra.

Laura’s daughter is very into mermaids, in case you couldn’t tell. And apparently she is concerned about overstimulating the plebes–TOO PRETTY. It’s a burden, as we pink-haired sirens know.

Anyway, here is Special Effects Atomic Pink a couple of days after dying, but no shampoos:

I think the color is actually a bit deeper than it shows here, and with a touch of blue (that stops it from fading orange). But if I keep taking photos in basically the same condition, we should still be able to get an idea of the fading process. For Science.

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*It is, in fact, the case that people routinely stop me on the street and ask for my hair dying advice, okay?

***She dictates to Laura, or to Laura’s boyfriend. Apparently, she liked the Japanese stationery that I sent her for her birthday so much that she “wrote” three letters in one afternoon. Then Laura, whose hand was probably cramping, suggested that three letters was enough for one day.

So recently I posted about a Kirk/Spock slash vid set to NIN’s “Closer”. I even specified, in case there was anyone who could not put “Kirk/Spock” and “Closer” together and come up with the logical conclusion, that it was very definitely Not Safe For Work.

So what does my father do?

“I watched the first half, but then a student showed up at my office with a question about something, and I had to close it abruptly.”
“Dad, do you remember what I said about the video IN THE ENTRY?”
“Well, I didn’t think you meant Not Safe For MY Work.”

This is, of course, the problem with subjective standards. I didn’t think it would be a good idea to watch this vid in my current place of employment, where I have an office that is off a hallway with lots of other offices and has a window and everything, but if I were back in the basement at UW, I’m sure I’d have watched it there. However, in general, if I think to warn you that something is Not Safe For Work? I probably really mean it. Don’t look if there are people around, unless you are employed by the pornography industry.

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Apparently my sister Sophie–who never posts in her LJ anymore, although she did finally join that Facegroup group I created for alumni of our elementary school–is the official Ant Cop at her job at the Children’s Museum in Minneapolis.

This means that in addition to telling the older children that they need to stop running before they squash a smaller child to death, she is responsible for Ant Tunnel Search & Rescue. There are all these tunnels with model ants in them that the kids get to crawl around in, including a room with a model queen ant, and sometimes children reach the queen ant and immediately freak the fuck out, screaming and crying and paralyzed with terror. At this point, Sophie, the Museum’s smallest employee, must crawl through the ant tunnels to retrieve them.

She likes her job, although she says she never knows what to say to the adults.

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Yesterday I took CalTrain into the city with my new discounted 10-ride pass and spent the day wandering around with Katherine, eating incredible food (cheap sushi at We Be Sushi, California hipster food at Luna Park), getting a super cute haircut at Zip Zap Hair in the Lower Haight, and getting my eyebrows waxed at Dolce around the corner, where a small Asian woman gently remonstrated with me about the importance of getting one’s eyebrows waxed at LEAST one a month and not (this was not explicitly stated but strongly implied) letting them sprout into hideous werewolf strips. She was unimpressed by my protest that I’d just moved. She did a really good job, though.

I also picked up a pair of jeans and plaid flannel pajama pants at Out of the Closet, a GLBT community thrift store, where another shopper counseled Katherine on what to wear when meeting your girlfriend’s somewhat conservative, religious parents for breakfast. She was much more helpful than I was, my general advice on the subject being, “I don’t know, pants?”

And THEN, Katherine introduced me to BevMo!, the California discount liquor super store. Incredible wine selection, and low prices on the liquor, too–apparently California has some of the lowest taxes on alcohol in the country. The experience has breathed new life into my plan to ship myself a case of wine when I move. The counter guy liked my hair, too.

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My hair didn’t get any comments that I recall in the city itself, but continues to attract attention in the suburbs. Friday evening at Compadres having drinks with some coworkers, a small girl departing with her family froze next to our table, transfixed by my hair. She whispered something that I was unable to make out; it takes many small children this way. They either scream about it or are rendered mute.

Afterwards my boss told me that after I had dinner at his house, one of his sons created a Lego person in my image–he had to use purple hair because there wasn’t any pink, and announced that the electric drill with which he accessorized me was a mobile device stylus. This reminds me of the time that my friend Kate’s younger sister made a doll of me to thank me for a mix CD I sent her. Apparently I just inspire figurines.

So I’m very excited about the birthday present I got for my friend Laura’s daughter Abby, who is turning four next week. (I’m also excited about the birthday present I got for my mother,* but she is 58 and can read, so best not to describe it in detail on the internet.) Speaking of reading, I’ve been writing Abby little letters for the past couple of months because Laura thought it might be an incentive for her to learn to read and write, of which Laura is sure she is capable but which she seems a little reluctant to actually DO (I suspect she may fear not being read to anymore, although of course this is groundless).

I told my friend Kristen about this plan and she looked a little skeptical:

“She’s going to learn to read from YOU writing to her?”
“What?! She likes me! She loves my hair! Anyway, little kids like mail.”
“No, I mean… your handwriting, Cabell.”
“Oh. Yeah. No no no. I print.”
“I was going to say.”
“Yeah, that would be kind of like those people in Kentucky who only spoke Klingon to their children.”

Currently, Laura reads Abby’s my letters and then takes dictation of the responses. The letter I received shortly before my prelim contained a paragraph about trees, which are tall, and have leaves and trunks, the latter component being shared with elephants. I remarked on how delightful I had found this–and how disappointed I was when I was unable to work it into my prelim–in a recent phone call, and Laura explained that Abby dictated that part after inquiring what exactly a “test” was, and Laura told her that it was when people ask you questions to see how much you know. Abby decided to focus on trees, which was good, because I hadn’t been reading much about them.

Anyway, Abby turns four next week, so when Kristen took me to the AMAZING Japanese import stationery store in the Town & Country shopping center in Palo Alto last week, I immediately thought that some cute Japanese stationery would make a good present–and then I spotted the pack with five different envelope/page designs, four of the five pink in varying degrees of intensity, and all of them covered in hearts.**

Clearly, it was meant to be.

I realized later, however, that I hadn’t provided for the sealing of these envelopes; Japanese stationery does not come with glue on. On the off chance that a gluestick might not be immediately at hand, I thought I should go ahead and include one. Admittedly, I didn’t really need to go BACK to the Japanese stationery store for a gluestick, but I sort of wanted to make another pass at it, so…

And I think I can safely say that few other consumer outlets would have had the variety of gluesticks available at the Japanese stationery store. Including, as it turned out, scented ones. As soon as I saw them, I realized how silly it was to be surprised.

Of course, I thought to myself. Strawberry-scented gluesticks. How Japanese.

And it went with the stationery.

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*My mother’s birthday present is over a month late. I am a bad daughter, although it didn’t help that her birthday was the day before I took the social psych prelim exam.

**Also some weird English, which hopefully will not freak Abby out the way the horned toad postcard did. Apparently she found it very unsettling that a creature that was so OBVIOUSLY a LIZARD should be called a “toad.” Children are very into categorization.

Yesterday I went over to my childhood friend Laura’s* house to hang out with her and her two children, baby Avery and 3-year-old Abby.

Abby loves me, or at least, Abby loves my hair:

“I’m going to touch her hair!”
“You have to ask permission before you touch people’s hair.”
“Please?”
“Please what?”
“C’n I touch your hair?”
“Oh, okay.”**

While I was there, she repeatedly begged me to come watch The Polar Express with her, played her tiny (but real) violin for me, had me read her a story, had me assist her with the drawing of a clarinet (she did not find my drawing very satisfactory), marveled at my piercings, touched my hair, and modeled the hat and scarf that I made for her when her baby brother was born. Oh, and I gave her a piggy back ride.

She is adorable. But I can see how parenting might get a little much, although Laura is really patient and good at it.

We brought her along when Laura gave me a ride back to my parents’ house, and she was very excited about our house, even if it didn’t totally live up to her expectations:

“Is your house big?”
“Yeah, it’s pretty big.”
“Is it PINK?”
“No.”
“Is it brown?”
“Yes, it is.”
“Did you paint it?”
“No, my parents hired some people from Jackson to paint it.”
“…Is it PINK?”

When we got to the house, she looked through various boxes bound for Goodwill, as well as my stocking stuffer box, which had several kitchen implements in it, including a spatula, which interested her insofar as she thought it might be used for making pie. Then I showed her the pink plastic Earth Wand, and she promptly began bopping people with it, transforming them into things:

“What did you turn me into?”
“…A spatula.”

She also seemed quite taken with Sophie; when she first came into the living room, we encountered my father, by whom she was rendered mute, but then Sophie came in and Abby ran right up to her, arms outstretched to be bounced up and down. It’s easy to see how Sophie might appeal to the 3-year-old demographic; she’s barely any bigger than them. And then Sophie helped Abby try on the sparkly red dress I wore to the Silver Arrow winter dance in 1998, cementing their friendship forever, I suspect.

Finally, they had to go home, but I did get some good pictures. I’m really glad that I’ve reconnected with Laura this year.

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*When people I know from high school or before call my cell phone, it plays “Teenage Dirtbag.” Oh, the cleverness of me.

**So she’s already doing way better than some of the creepazoids I’ve encountered at the St. Vincent de Paul thrift store on Willy St. Seriously, who thinks it is okay to come up to a STRANGER and STROKE THEIR HAIR?