wickedqueen.net

So today is my third day biking into work, and my second making it here in approximately 40 minutes due to not going seven miles out of my way. So far, the wind has been against me every morning, which also happens to be the direction in which there is more uphill going; this is fine with me, since it means that on my way home in the evening I am going mostly downhill with the wind at my back, and I shower after I get to work in the morning anyway.

On Tuesday, on the way home, I actually stopped in at Trader Joe’s near my house for a few additional grocery items I’d forgotten when Stevie drove me around on Saturday to run errands. This involved going a few blocks down El Camino because I hadn’t yet discovered how to get there on California;* although I am normally a strong opponent of sidewalk-biking, El Camino is insanely busy and has no bike lane, and I do not have a rearview mirror.**

Not that a rearview mirror would do you much good against a guy leaning out the passenger-side window of a pick-up truck and SCREAMING IN YOUR EAR.

This is exactly what happened to me, within my first block of El Camino. I narrowly avoided running into the bus stop that was coming up ahead of me. The subsequent yelling, which continued for the next three blocks every time they passed me (there were unfortunately a bunch of red lights), was at least not as startling, although it did become even more abusive in tone after I gave them the finger.***

Everyone to whom I’ve mentioned the incident is just floored that such a thing could happen in freaking Mountain View, California. The only thing that would have made sense would be if they’d been giving me shit for being on the sidewalk, but the content of the yelling was actually mainly centered around my hair, which is somewhat visible even when I am wearing a helmet.**** One would of course imagine that most people in Mountain View have seen freaky hair as well as cyclists, but perhaps the combination was just too much. I haven’t been subjected to ANY other negative behavior on my bike, though; people actually let me make LEFT TURNS, for godsakes. Sometimes they even yield to me when they have the right-of-way.***** El Camino aside, most of the major roads I want to ride on have bike lanes. I am totally ruined for trying to bike in most of Missouri, from whence I can only imagine the assholes in that pick-up hailed. Or maybe they have family there.

Or you know, maybe it’s me and my attitude problem. I think I might have what they call a “haughty bearing,” although I didn’t think it would be so obvious while hunched over my handlebars, and much like my tendency to attempt to lead while dancing, I’m not sure I can turn it off. The bird-flipping, though, I should probably try to work on.

I really like riding my bike, though. I definitely plan to keep it up when I get back to Madison, which is fairly decent for bicycling, especially by general Midwestern standards. My friend Keely recently suggested we should take one of the little bike maintenance classes that one of the shops offers; I think I’ll take her up on it. Whee.******

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*It often takes me a very long time to learn new routes places, because my sense of direction is so bad that I am loathe to experiment. California runs parallel to El Camino, however, and has a nice bike lane, and I’ve pretty much got the six or seven block stretch of it that I need down, I think.

+Although I have considered nail polish lightning bolts.

The good news: Unlike at least 95% of US airports, the Las Vegas airport does, in fact, have free wireless access.

The bad news: This is particularly relevant to me now that I am stranded at the Las Vegas airport until midnight.

Basically, America West dicked me out of making my connecting flight by running 35 minutes late and never issuing me a boarding pass for my American Airlines connection, which meant that when I arrived in Las Vegas, they were already putting standby passengers on the flight and there was no way in hell to get my boarding pass, even though I had IMMEDIATELY tried to check in at one of the automated stations–or as immediately as possible, since the gate agent who the flight attendants assured me would be able to tell me where to go to make my connecting AA flight just stared at me blankly and said, “Well, you’ll have to go back through security… I don’t know.”

The moral of the story is FUCK AMERICA WEST. Do not fly them. The American Airlines people were very nice and it is not their fault that the only thing available was an 11:45 flight through Chicago that will deposit me in St. Louis at 8 am tomorrow, with a real possibility of me falling asleep on the plane, getting a blood clot, and dying.

Don’t worry, I will ask the flight attendant to wake me. And I plan to drink heavily as a preventative measure. (Alcohol is a blood thinner! It is medicinal!)

Also, I have only been here for an hour, and I have already won $13.75. I have a system.

Yesterday the Mormons came to my house. I didn’t realize this at first. I thought it was yet another canvassing call from Environmental Action, whose organizational skills do not impress me, so I don’t give them money anyway.

I had time to speculate because, after I answered the knock at the door to find two nattily dressed young men in the foyer, there was an extremely long silence, during which I peered at them, and they stared at me.

Finally I said, “Yes?”

This seemed to jumpstart the one in front, who began sputtering out an introduction of their role and purpose.

“No, thank you,” I said. Which, admittedly, I would have said anyway, but if you’re going to go door to door for Jesus, folks, you should really work on getting a foot in the door. You have to be quick! You have to be smooth! A nose ring and a little pink hair cannot stun you into silence!

…Even if the hair is currently shaped into the Worst Haircut in the History of the World, Ever. That happened yesterday also, but I don’t want to talk about it. If only that Supercuts had not been placed so temptingly next to the doctor’s office.

Speaking of which, my latest general practitioner does not think that I should avoid all hormones of all kinds for the rest of my life, but she DOES think that a) I am a borderline alcoholic–this is what I get for not lying about my intake like everyone else–and b) cream cheese does not contain calcium. No, seriously. She was asking about my calcium intake and when I said “cream cheese,” she said, “Oh, I don’t think CREAM CHEESE has calcium in it.”

It does, in case you were wondering. Because it is CHEESE. It has more calcium for its volume than yogurt. Also, I am not actually an alcoholic. Next time I’ll just give her a number that is roughly half my estimated intake, she’ll mentally multiply it by two, and everyone will be happy. Although at this point I don’t plan to see another GP unless I am, like, dropping off body parts.

So I had to get blood drawn again today. I went up to the hematology department to check in with the receptionist. I gave her my last name and appointment time; she pulled up my chart on the computer, looked up at me dubiously, and said:

“Cannabel?”

No, lady. Let’s take a moment to consider why no one’s parents would ever name them that, okay?

I know that my name is not usual. I am generally quite patient with people’s inability to pronounce it. I provide a helpful mneumonic device, sometimes at the cost of mockery heaped upon my person by acquaintances of longer standing. But I get somewhat irritated when people insert whole extra syllables containing letters that CLEARLY DO NOT OCCUR IN MY NAME, even when the resulting compound is NOT something too ridiculous even for urban legend.

Cannabel. Jesus.

So lately, I’ve been going to bellydancing classes at the gym with Keely. I can’t fence while I’m on blood thinners, and I wanted to tone up my abs, and I always thought bellydancing looked like fun, although I am really, really bad at learning choreography of any kind.

And I admit that, up front. I suck at learning choreography, and also–not the greatest combination–I get mad when I can’t learn things. Long division is the first thing I remember not getting immediately at school, and I was PISSED. There is probably a reason that my “concentrating” face looks mad.

But I WANT to learn things. I do! I don’t want to get mad and quit everything that I can’t do right away. So you know, I try to persevere, when I really want to know how to do something. But the thing is, I may suck at learning things, but man does the girl they have teaching this class suck at TEACHING.

I realize that it’s just a weekly bellydance class for which one just has to have the $10/semester group X sticker (with which you can attend as many different classes as you want), and so of course a 20-year-old college kid is precisely who you’d expect them to have teaching it, and I’m sure she’s a very fine bellydancer–she SEEMS good, to my untrained eye–but she cannot teach for shit.

She mixes up her right and her left. She starts doing things four times faster without warning and then giggles adorably and starts us over. She abruptly starts doing new moves that she hasn’t shown us and then giggles adorably and says, “OH, that’s NEXT.” She tries to take us through an entire dance routine in 45 minutes–except she usually runs over, because she can’t tell time either–and has yet to do any focusing on basic building block moves. So I end up sort of helplessly trying to mimic what she’s doing, but I have no idea, at the end of the class, if I’ve done ANYTHING right.

It is very frustrating. Keely has taken to shooting me concerned sidelong glances and patting me on the arm. I know I am glowering. And I am glowering from the front row, because dammit, someone always stands DIRECTLY IN FRONT OF ME if I’m not in the front row, and it’s even worse if I can’t even SEE the instructor.

There is a bellydancing minicourse through the student union, which seems to be taught by someone with actual teaching experience, but it’s on Thursday nights during my night class, so that’s out. And I really WANT to learn to bellydance. On the rare occasions when I feel like I’m doing something right, it’s cool. I want to isolate my abs more and stuff. But goddamn is it frustrating. So I guess I’m going to keep trying… we’ll see how long I can take it.

So today I was waiting in line at the post office to send a package, and I overheard a conspiratorial exchange between the guy ahead of me and the woman at the counter about how ANNOYED they are about people saying, “Happy holidays.”

“I mean,” said the postal clerk, “I don’t mind HEARING it. But when people say it just so as not to OFFEND anyone…”

Yes, because god knows that we should not look to the basis of our entire system of etiquette when choosing our holiday greetings.

Sadly, my plan to wish the clerk a happy Hannukah was foiled when someone else got done and I got a different clerk.

So I’m going to see a doctor who hopefully won’t kill me through negligence. I called around today and actually found a GP who is taking new patients and can see me the day before I leave for break, AND she is located at the most convenient clinic for me. Here’s hoping she’s not of the school that believes a single glass of wine will lead directly to head injury.

At any rate, one can certainly imagine that the nurses at a real doctor’s office are less likely to:

1. Ask me how to spell “warfarin” when taking my patient history.
2. Act annoyed when I call to ask if I can go to the gym, telling me laughingly, “OF COURSE you can use the exercise bike, we just want you to avoid contact sports!” only to have another of their number exhort me in hushed tones the following week that the doctor wants me to REST and ELEVATE my leg (the first time I will have heard such an instruction in the week and a half since I was diagnosed)! What am I doing at the gym! And, of course, completely ignore me when I point out multiple times that I wouldn’t have been working out if I hadn’t been explicitly told by a nurse that it was okay.
3. Tell me to take ibprofen prior to taking the vicodin for which I requested a prescription because I am on blood thinners and cannot take normal pain medications.
4. Listen to me tell them that I have co-pays, and I’d really like the least expensive medication options, and then call in prescriptions for two different sizes of warfarin when I could have easily split the freaking tablets. Or taken multiples of the 2.5 mg version. Or whatever.

At least today my INR was up to 1.9–that is still too low, but high enough that they said I can stop giving myself injections of Lovenox in the stomach. Of course, that means I paid $15 for two single-dose syringes.* I don’t think there’s much of a black market for my left-over low-weight heparin.

I also called my insurance provider, and although “routine” care is normally not covered out-of-area, they are willing to make an exception for necessary bloodwork for the adjustment of my medication dosage; I just have to let them know exact dates and where I’ll be getting it done. So that’s good.

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*I know that, in the big scheme of things, $15 for meds is nothing, but so far this month now I’ve had $55 in prescription co-pays–and I’m also going to get billed for my two visits to the ER, even though one of them was directly mandated by a physician.

Hey, creepy people: I know I’ve been working out and lost a lot of weight and regained my mojo confidence and stuff, and am thus now totally smoking hot, but actually? This means that there has never been a worse time to hit on me.

I’m not saying your odds were GOOD when I was out of shape and depressed and filled with self-loathing, but they are even worse now.

Today is a great day.

At last, AT LAST, I have caught the gum-chewing bitch in action.

Let me explain.

I may have previously mentioned that someone in the women’s locker room leaves gum wrappers all over the bench and floor in the area by my locker on a regular basis. In recent weeks, this has escalated to three or four times a week that I have found individual gum wrappers and, on one occasion, the outer wrapper of a large pack. What really frustrated me is that I had on one occasion early in the semester actually SEEN the perpetrator, but that was before I knew that she was going to drop her gum wrappers wherever she happened to be standing EVERY DAMN TIME, and so sadly, I had no idea which particular locker was hers.

Well, today, I came in to the gym and someone had left a great pile of personal possessions–bag, hat, coat, water bottle, etc.–strewn across the bench, taking up a good dozen lockers’ worth of room.* I shoved them down to the end to make room to take off my shoes. After a few minutes, a blonde girl came down the row, shot me a dirty look, and opened a locker, and I recognized her instantly. It didn’t hurt that she was smacking loudly on some gum.

She changed into her gym clothes and departed, but the important thing is that now I know which locker is hers. I think you can guess where any future gum wrappers are going. Not to mention any other litter I happen to find if she keeps it up.

Yeah, take THAT, you mannerless whippersnapper. THE TIDE HAS TURNED.

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*I really don’t understand people who leave all their shit unattended at the gym. Your water bottle, okay, fine, probably no one wants your spit, but your bag? There’s another girl in my locker row who I really only saw for the first time a week or two ago, and as she was remarking on how our schedules must really coincide, I was thinking, So YOU’RE the one who leaves her iPod just fucking LYING AROUND all the time. She does. It just sits there on the bench. I’ve considered stealing it just to teach her a lesson.

So far, it has been an irritating day. There are a lot of things that I feel are sort of basic understandings of the world around one that some people, apparently, need to have laid out in a clear rule-based format:

1. Internet kiosks located in public buildings such as the rec center are not, in fact, substitute computer labs. They are not for writing page-long emails back to the farm. Especially when the person standing behind you has already inquired in a pointed tone if you are close to finished.
2. When you are approaching a pedestrian crosswalk, it is not your right or responsibility to cheerfully wave the person at the stop sign on. As hopefully the driver is aware even if you are not, there are 50 other people all trying to cross the street, too.
3. Your gum wrappers do not belong in an abandoned pile on the bench in the rec center locker room. They especially do not belong there five times in two weeks.
4. Get your goddamn bicycle off the sidewalk.
5. If you’re going to make elevators from which certain floors are accessible only by key, you might want to provide some kind of indication of which floors those might be.

It is hard to make a rule against discovering a sluggish yellow jacket crawling around on your pant leg, but I’d have preferred it if that hadn’t happened, either.

Also my calculator display has burned out in some crucial spots, and I am going to have to get a new one. I guess it is several years old, but still.

At least my old red plaid pants fit me perfectly again. They’re very indie.