GIFs from Hell: or, My Visit to the Doctor

Sick

I am one of those people who never gets sick. Almost.

Or should I say: I am almost never one of those people, or I am one of those people who almost, or – never, or -

I don’t know what happened on March 12. It felt like a cold. Just a nuisancy thing, a premature summer cold (like the viral bout of what-I-was-sure-was-flu last July). One of those gummy-throated, slightly raw, uneasily sneezy – but you already know what I mean.

I don’t know when it pounced. Maybe the next day. Suddenly a lightning bolt slashed across my chest, my throat became so raw I couldn’t swallow, my eyes were sealed nearly shut, I shivered, I sweated, I ached, I couldn’t breathe, and I came to the conclusion that I had one of those nice little summer colds I had last July.

How do I know? My doctor told me so.

It doesn’t matter what you “have” now. Your doctor listens to your back (never your chest), then, even if it’s pleurisy or pneumonia or bubonic plague, says “It’ll just have to go away on its own.”

This thing has been “going away on its own” for ten days now. I won’t get into the digestive problems. Oh yes I will. I have abdominal cramps, gas, diarrhea and it takes days to digest anything. (I am totting up all these “symptoms” just as I think of them.) Last night, trying to sleep while listening to a rhythmic bubbling, creaking groan in my chest, a sudden freshet of blood shot all over my pillowcase, presumably a nosebleed, the first one I have ever had in my life.

Nice little summer cold.

I have had the aches and the shakes. Bizarre gushing sweats alternate with freezing shivers. And twitches, very strange ones, quite violent, almost like little seizures. I get six or seven of them, one right after the other. Why? I couldn’t eat and couldn’t throw up and suffered one of those migraines that should have its own postal code.

It was the usual thing, where it would seem to get a little bit better. One day I went for a drive, came home, lay down for a moment, and lifted my head 90 minutes later, my face stuck to the pillow with God knows what.

I don’t know what got me onto the cough syrup, because I hate the stuff. Maybe it was the groany deep quivering vibrations in my chest that seemed almost like whales talking. Maybe it was coughing up all that unspeakable “stuff”. I took a shot of it once, I swear, just to put myself under. It didn’t work, because cough syrup has all sorts of stuff in it that causes a frightening rebound effect. You lie there in the dark with jangling alarm-bells going off in your head, sure you will never feel any better. Ever.

Funny sounds began to issue from my body. The first funny sound seemed to be coming from my larynx, which was as swollen as a golf ball and almost wouldn’t let me swallow. When I tried to sleep, I heard a noise like an old rope being sawed back and forth on one of those ships, you know, like on Popeye. Then, to my horror, I heard a little “hoo, hoo!” sound, as if something were alive and swimming around in there. It was the first time my larynx has ever talked back to me.

It’s a choir, of sorts, a chorus of mucus and phlegm and other disgusting fluids no one would want. My sinuses crackle and make a sound like a balloon being squeezed. When I sit up in the morning, a huge windy wheeze gusts up out of my windpipe, sounding like an old pedal organ or air brakes on a bus. It scares the shit out of me.

“You HAVE to go to the doctor,” my husband says. “What did the doctor say?” my friend asks me. She must come from the school who still believes “going to the doctor” actually has a point. I have come to believe that doctors do absolutely dick-all these days except listen to your back and push the little button on the machine that says, “It’ll just have to go away on its own.”

I know that for a long time, doctors prescribed too many antibiotics. These same doctors would have us believe that this was all the fault of the patients, because they refused to leave the office without that little piece of paper.  After moaning and groaning and begging and pleading, they went home gaily waving a prescription, feeling oh-so-much-better-already. And eventually, when these drugs stopped working from overprescribing, GUESS WHOSE FAULT IT WAS?

The doctor’s? Don’t be ridiculous! Doctors are fountainheads of Wisdom and Truth. They would NEVER prescribe anything unless the patient absolutely needed it, or else got them down in a choke-hold on the floor and refused to release them until they had that little piece of paper.

The patients, self-indulgent, weak and soft in the head, DEMANDED these prescriptions. It had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that doctors wanted to process patients in and out of the office at light speed, and the best way to do that – the best way to get rid of them fast – was to hand them that little piece of paper.

NEXT!

As with most things, the situation has swung wildly from one stupid extreme to the other. From handing EVERYONE a prescription for banana-flavored Amoxicillin or whatever it's called just to get them out that revolving door as fast as possible, doctors now Do Not Prescribe Antibiotics. EVER. For anything. Antibiotics no longer work, you see. The reason they no longer work is that YOU asked for them all the time, you self-indulgent little whiner! You spoiled it for everyone, so now we can't prescribe them at all, or we'll Look Bad. Some big doctor, some high-up doctor, some Great Agency in the Sky that tells doctors what to do, has now told doctors Not To Prescribe Antibiotics.

EVER.

Which is why I will clearly die, rather than disgrace myself by crawling in to the doctor's office and asking please, please, PLEASE may I have some of that banana-flavored goo with the capacity to save my life.  It's been a privilege whining to you.

Best role models for kids in the '60s

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm


http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

Duelling dulcimers

For reasons unknown, I can no longer post a YouTube video in the usual way. I have to do back-flips and stuff (i. e. I can't browse, but already have to know the name of it in order to find it!). This however is worth any kerfuffle. I'm not a mountain music fan, but this stuff! Mountain dulcimer can be excruciating, like playing stretched wires (which I guess it is), but these two make it sound golden. She's a tad sedate and he's really groovin' (holding his instrument aslant as if it will soon tip right off his lap). But when they look at each other at the end. . . it's the sweetest moment.

I'm always digging around for the wacky 78 rpm recordings of my childhood, especially the Children's Record Guild collection, a sort of record-of-the-month club that mailed you a new recording for something like $2. We didn't subscribe to this, but were given a whole whack of recordings, 50 or 60 of them maybe, by someone whose kids must either have never played them, or were so careful they didn't even leave a scratch on them.

Within a couple of months, Davy Crockett sounded like, "king of the wild frontier. . .tier. . . tier. . . tier. . . tier" (etc.)  The background ambience soon resembled World War 3, but the records were well-loved and constantly played.

Some records represented the force-feeding of classical music, with Cinderella accompanied by music from Prokofiev's ballet and Midsummer Night's Dream by Mendelssohn's incidental music. This was all part of a general indoctrination I suffered through: almost everything I heard, saw, smelled or touched (or tasted?) had to be oriented towards "good" music. No other music (not even "that rock 'n roll music" I later came to love) existed in our tiny stifling universe.

Thus came various musical punishments: Victor Borge narrating some sort of swill about "Piccolo, Saxie and Company"; Rusty in Orchestraville, a morality tale about what happens to little boys who don't practice the piano; Willie, the Whale who Wanted to Sing at the Met (already covered in a previous post, so let's not go there again). And something about the history of the orchestra which, I remember, began with a smarmy narrator saying, "Well, well, well! Here is an orchesta!" And here I thought it was a cheese blintz.

It really was a narrowing education, not a broadening one. We should have known something about mountain music, about jazz and blues, but my father looked down on these renegade forms as if they didn't exist. I think it came from his background of dire poverty, his ignorance of any music except for the excruciatingly bad English music-hall stuff he grew up with. He was always terrified of being found out and even deliberately erased his Cockney accent on arriving in Canada.

I remember (and even found on YouTube once) a Children's Record Guild 78 rpm recording - might have been by the Weavers, in fact - of a song called Round and Round the Christmas Tree, which is the same tune as this dulcimer duet. I think of the fluidity of this kind of music, passed along by memory and never written down. The fact that Appalachian music has echoed through the generations with its integrity intact fascinates me. No Children's Record Guild required: they had memories then, and ears to hear.

Kiddie Records Weekly

http://www.kiddierecords.com/2006/archive/week_05.htm

OLLA! Caitlin and Ryan in Mexico

Chow-chow-chow! Talented cats

Hello, Matt!

Compare and contrast!

Bad Girls in College: has anything changed?

While jazzing around the topic of college girls and morality, I came across an antique ad poster which is unintentionally hilarious (see yesterday's post). Written in 1905, it warned young girls - and their parents - of the evils of college life, implying (with a sledge hammer) that higher education turns virtuous young women into raving sluts, ruined for all prospects of marriage and respectability.

Then I found this astonishing (contemporary) treatise online. I cannot even imagine a college girl, tasting personal freedom for the first time, soberly reading this thing and saying to herself, "Well then, I guess I had better stay away from  parties and remain chaste, saving myself for the holy bonds of wedlock."

Between the lines, beyond the supposed candour and up-to-date medical viewpoint, this thing is as antiquated, as repressive and condescending as that poster depicting the smoking slut in the slip. I will attempt some up-to-the-minute commentary in between a few choice excerpts.

Sense and Sexuality  

The college girl’s guide to real protection in a hooked-up world.

By Miriam Grossman, M.D. (Note that it's written by a doctor!)

Intimacy promotes attachment and trust


Intimate behavior floods your brain with a chemical that fuels attachment. Cuddling, kissing, and sexual contact releases oxytocin, a hormone that announces: I’m with someone special now. Time to switch love on, and caution off.


Gentle reader: knowest thou whether thy lower nature is inclining thee towards base behaviour? Knowest thou not that the impulses of Eve are as seductive now as when she first handed Adam the apple?

When oxytocin levels are high, you’re more likely to overlook your partner’s faults, and to take risks you otherwise wouldn’t. So you certainly do not want your brain drenched in this hormone when making critical decisions like, What do I think of him? How far do I want this to go? When it comes to sex, oxytocin, like alcohol, turns red lights green. It plays a major role in what’s called “the biochemistry of attachment.” Because of it, you could develop feelings for a guy whose last intention is to bond with you. You might think of him all day, but he can’t remember your name.

Maidens! Thinkest thou that he be of good family, of peerless reputation? Prithee, reconsider. The merest hint of oxytocin in thy innocent veins may stimulate a flood of reprehensible behaviour. Beware the Biochemistry of Attachment! Consider it before ever accepting a date with one of these beasts! Warn him in advance, "I won't kiss you tonight. My oxytocin levels are too high."

Science confirms: alcohol makes him hot ... when he’s not.

Did you hear? Science has confirmed the existence of “beer goggles”—when a person seems more attractive to you after you’ve had a few drinks. Enjoy a glass of wine or a couple of beers at a party, and the guy hitting on you  begins to look better than when you arrived. It works the other way too: guys will find your face prettier after they’ve had a few.

Dost thou believe that a single sip of beer or a few jello shots can never ruin thy reputation? Get real, maidens! It takes but one taste, especially if thine drink be spiked with the Date Rape drug. Do thine homework before taking that first slug!

In a British study, 80 college students rated photos of unfamiliar faces of men and women their age; alcohol consumption significantly raised the scores given to photos of the opposite sex. Drinking affects the nucleus accumbens, the area of the brain used to determine facial attractiveness. It’s probably one of several reasons that casual, high risk sex is often preceded by alcohol consumption. In the morning, you both look different.

Recognizeth thou the face of thy seducer? I thought not, any more than he recognizeth thee. Be-eth he as ugly as the back end of an elephant? Didst  thou not receive warning before indulging in  this debauchery? Take heed to the nucleus accumbens! When discussing sex with thy girl friends, make sure you bring up the nucleus accumbens! When talking to a prospective suitor, let the nucleus accumbens be thy first order of business!

A younger cervix is more vulnerable to infection.

Your cervix, the entrance to your uterus, has a vulnerable area one cell thick, called the transformation zone. It’s easy for HPV (the human papillomavirus, which can cause genital warts, and even cervical cancer) to settle in there. That’s why most teen girls are infected from one of their first sexual partners. By adulthood the transformation zone is replaced with a thicker, tougher surface. So it’s wise to delay sexual activity, or, if you’ve already started, to stop.

Stop, young maidens, stop! Stop thy beating heart! Stop thy throbbing, oh, whatever. Is it not worth the price of death to retain thy virtue?

Even though these infections are common, and usually disappear with time, learning you have one can be devastating. Natural reactions are shock, anger, and confusion. Who did I get this from, and when? Was he unfaithful? Who should I tell? And hardest of all: Who will want me now?

Ah, the price of wantonness. Ruined, ruined! Will any man look upon thee now without seeing a raving slut? "Oh, how I wish I had paid heed to my nucleus accumbens!"

These concerns can affect your mood, concentration, and sleep. They can deal a serious blow to your self esteem. And to your GPA.

Though thou art attending college to snag a husband, not to attain a degree, a careless slide in your GPA may lead to sliding in other areas, such as morality. It doth be a slippery, nay, a well-lubricated slope.

The HPV vaccine is a major achievement, but the protection it provides is limited. You are still vulnerable to other infections like herpes, chlamydia, HIV, and non-covered strains of HPV.

And of course no vaccine prevents a broken heart.

Take heed, gentle maidens. Thou mayest have a broken heart along with a ruptured hymen (not to mention a cervix flooded with oxytocin). Is this merely the inevitable price of higher education. . . or the wages of wanton moral abandon? Ask thy doctor to explain all this to you before you make that "other" visit in a couple of months.

The Post-Blog Afterglow:

Since posting all that early-19th-century-via-2013 stuff above (in about 6 different fonts, but that's just how it came out), I found out a little bit more about this Miriam Grossman. To put it bluntly, she's something to the right of Atilla the Hun and would rather young girls not have sex at all. I can't quote everything in her lovely little pamphlet (which lacks the slutty cover, but otherwise is pretty much the same), but I did find this "nugget" which I had to pass along:



The rectum is an exit, not an entrance.

Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute

And about those other sexual activities ...
Having more than five oral sex
partners has been associated with throat cancer.
Turns out that HPV can cause malignant tumors in
the throat, just like it does in the cervix.
In a study of sexually active college men, HPV
was found both where you’d expect—the genital
area—and where you wouldn’t: under fingernails.

Yes, you read that right. Researchers now speculate
whether the virus can be shared during activities
considered “safe,” like mutual masturbation.
According to the Centers for Disease Control,
approximately 30% of all women will have had
anal intercourse by the age of 24. Even with
condoms, this behavior places them at increased
risk of infection with HIV and other STDs. For
example, the risk for HIV transmission during anal
intercourse is at least 20 times higher than with
vaginal intercourse.

The government website, www.fda.gov, provides
no-nonsense advice about avoiding HIV: “Condoms
provide some protection, but anal intercourse is
simply too dangerous to practice.”
The rectum is an exit, not an entrance. Anal
penetration is hazardous. Don’t do it.

Your fertility is a window of opportunity that will close.

Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute

Seventy-five percent of college freshmen
say that raising a family is an “essential or
very important goal.” But 55% of younger highachieving
women are childless at 35. And 89% of
them think they’ll be able to get pregnant into
their forties.

OK, time out. It’s easiest for a woman to
conceive and deliver a healthy child in her
twenties. Fertility declines slightly at 30, and
more dramatically at 35. You may imagine that
the waiting rooms of fertility clinics are packed
with obese women smoking cigarettes. If so,
you’re wrong: they are filled with health-conscious
women who work out and count calories. They are
there because they’re forty.

If having children is one of your dreams, it
won’t hurt to keep these facts in mind as you
make decisions about careers and relationships.
Remember that motherhood doesn’t always happen
when the time is right for you; there’s a window of
opportunity, then the window closes.
For some women, just as this window is
closing, they feel an unexpected longing for a child.

It saddens me each time a patient describes this—
typically a student who always put career first, and
is finally getting a Ph.D. at 38 or 40. She’s thrilled
to reach that milestone, but aches for another: to
feel a new life inside her, to give birth.
The rewards of sexuality—with the right guy,
at the right time—are immense. Ask an older
woman you respect who waited and chose
the right man; you might be surprised to hear
her describe love and passion that has lasted for
decades—and k

ENOUGH ENOUGH ENOUGH! What IS this Clare Booth Luce Policy thingie, anyway? Why not just tie her legs together, for God's sake, or take out the whatever-gland, what it is that makes young women horny in the first place.

I gather this is pretty far-right-wing stuff, at least from the criticisms of it I've found on the net. Dr. Grossman may be Jewish, but she burns with Republican fervor as surely as those right-wing fundamentalist jackasses on phone-in radio. Read between the lines, and we're talking chastity, the kind of thing Southern Bab-tist girls make vows about while wearing gauzy white dresses and dancing with their fathers.

Hey! Who's the slut in the slip?

I remember looking for this a couple of years ago, and coming away feeling foolish, as if I'd imagined it. There was no sign of it anywhere then. It was in a book about women's sexuality during the Edwardian era. Obviously, higher education was a road to ruin in those days, with fresh young college girls soon deteriorating into chain-smoking, un-bed-making, card-playing, sleazy-magazine-reading, barefoot, tousle-haired, slip-strap-sliding SLUTS.

To transcribe the text:

Is College Bad for Girls? A Personal Canvass. Articles:

* Evils of Dormitory Life - Midnight Hours of Who Knows What?

* Flirting and Speaking to Male Students without Proper Introduction and             
  Chaperone.

* Reading Improper Novels, Magazines, and Other Suggestive Literature.

* Forming of Unladylike Habits that May Harm the Health and Morals of a delicate Girl - Such as Smoking and Card Playing.


I love the fact that this pamphlet (and wouldn't you like to get your hands on the whole thing?) was "available from your doctor". Now, just what sort of doctor would that be?

Doing a little more burrowing into all this salacious filth, I found this astonishing artifact: a personal canvas (tote, probably) printed with the Personal Canvass!

It isn't super-obvious unless you blow this up big, but her left nipple is showing. Is she being deliberately provocative, or is it just a wardrobe malfunction?

Rest in Peace, Mr. Trololo

I was truly shocked and sorry to hear (belatedly - I can't keep up with all these things!) of the death of Mr. Trololo, that internet sensation whose song - well, what WAS it called anyway? Trololo? - made him an internet sensation 30 years after the fact.

I saw some video of him taken a couple of years ago, and he seemed like his usual jaunty self. Hadn't really aged that much. He must have avoided the vodka-and-cigarettes diet so common in Vladivostok.

I will miss him. I truly feel sad about this. Do you know why I liked him so much? He was fun. His jollity was refreshing. His voice was really pretty good, too, compared to the atrocious swill I've been posting in the past couple of days. I found the playlist of an album he cut long ago, and I'll try to dredge it up because it's pretty entertaining, too.

May you find happiness in heaven, Mr. Trololo.

(From Wikipedia - I'm paraphrasing for emphasis):

He was the first artist to sing such songs as:

Woodcutters (Лесорубы in Russian)  

Moon Stone (Лунный камень) by Arkady Ostrovsky 

Song about Friend (Песня о друге) 

Blue Cities (Голубые города)

And People Go To the Sea (А люди уходят в море) by Andrey Petrov

Other popular songs performed by Khil included: 

From What the Homeland Begins? (С чего начинается Родина?) 

How the Steamers Are Seen Off (Как провожают пароходы) 

Winter (Зима) 

Birch Sap (Берёзовый сок)

Alder Catkin  (Серёжка ольховая)

We Need Only the Victory (Нам нужна одна победа) 

and many others.

Khil's manner of execution of songs is unique and easily recognizable in 

Russia, characterized by charm, always having a great sounding bright, 

sonorous voice and the flight of lyrical baritone, with the powerful charge of 

optimism and humour.

Ele-pants (or: Trunk Envy)

The world of the contemporary knitter is strange. And growing stranger. There's some sort of guerrila movement afoot to festoon public facilities like park benches with, well, knitty-things. It's called Guerrilla Knitting or some-such. I should look it up right now. (Nah.)

These artistic installations are done by young knitters, and I don't know what possesses them to pick up needles and wool in the first place. Knitting was always a Grandma-thing, wasn't it?

I'm one of the oldsters, the Beehive pattern set who used to knit on long, straight steel needles that I still have. Cold as hell, clanky, scrapy, heavy, and horrible. I wonder if the daring new set of Yarn Harlots uses these. Probably not. . . maybe they knit with their fingers.

OK, I looked it up:

Yarn bombing, yarnbombing, yarnstorming, guerrilla knitting, urban knitting or graffiti knitting is a type of graffiti or street art that employs colorful displays of knitted or crocheted yarn or fibre rather than paint or chalk.

I'd-a just dismissed all this as an urban myth, but when I was going to the Dollarama with Caitlin (9 years old and savvy about everything), she pointed to a brightly-colored tangle of textile artfully draped on a  fence pole and said, "Look, Grandma. Yarn bombing."

The one Caitlin and I saw wasn't like the colorful tree cozy you see above. To me it looked like one of the reluctant snarls I sometimes have to pitch into the garbage (i. e. the panda I killed with scissors, many posts ago). I don't know how you do the stripey ones.. I guess you shimmy up there and knit it right on to the tree.

ANYWAY, I am now far off-topic. I wanted to compare notes on some elephant-ware I have seen on the net lately. I'm attempting my first elephant from a book called World of Knitted Toys which attempts to represent the animals therein in a more realistic way than usual.

I doubt if the blighter will look like this, but I can try. So far he is using up more and more yarn, so that I will have to go trotting back to Michaels (again), praying it all works out in the end.

I suspect these are dolls, not human beings ((in fact I have an awful feeling the bottom one is a silicone Reborn, the type elderly Southern women talk to and rock to sleep at night). The hats are cute, aren't they? But why not knit the body and be done with it?

Strange elephants. Looking as they have received electroshock therapy in the recent past. But cute, also, in a sort of abstract way.

I'm not going to be critical of anyone who knits a whole elephant. It's a long and often tedious process. This is the snuggle-bug variety who has a rare talent for climbing trees (or else a strange sort of elephantine yarn bomb).

Heads bigger than bodies. Might they tip over in the wild?

I have a pet peeve, and a serious one: knitted stuffies with no eyes. They look creepy and devoid of all character or expression. In my case, sometimes the only thing that saves a project from the garbage pail (over which most of my things hover at least 3 or 4 times) is giving it a face: eyes, a mouth, a nice little smile or nose holes.

I have a few more pictures,  but this breathtaking image sweeps them all aside. These are called elephant pants (or elephant underwear: would you really want to wear these in public?)  Obviously, careful measurements would need to be taken before you proceed. I don't know how it must feel to sit on those ears, and there is no discernible fly, making it less convenient than the average tighty-whitey pair of gaunch. But at least this one has a facial expression, almost as if it's smiling. Or something.