I’ve always liked the term conjunctivitis. It don’t know why; it just sounds cool. The disease itself... not so much. I’ve gotten it a few times, and it sucks. The worst was on a red-eye (ironically) from Seattle to DC. I feel asleep – like full-on R.E.M. asleep, a rarity for me on a flight – and when I woke up I couldn’t see. Both eyes were crusted closed, and I was completely discombobulated. It was as if I had been unfrozen from carbonite. Eventually I figured out what was going on and where I was, which was unfortunate, because, although I was not in Jabba’s palace on Tatooine*, I was on an airplane somewhere over Mid-America. This meant I had to sit there and do nothing for three more hours before I could even attempt to contact a doctor. Also, I had to avoid freaking everybody out in my row with my pus-oozing eyeballs. Luckily, I had one of those sleep masks, so I put it on for the rest of the flight, even though I couldn’t fall back asleep.
At the time I had a lousy health insurance plan under Kaiser Permanente, and if I went anywhere but this one Kaiser clinic I got hit with out-of-network fees, so I drove straight to the clinic from the airport, even though they don’t take walk-ins. The not-at-all-friendly woman at the desk said I would need to make an appointment, and they didn’t have anything open until the next day. I pleaded with her for a few minutes (she could clearly see I needed help), and then she did something people in her position often do that I don’t understand: She got me what I wanted, but she kept me in suspense about it. It's like she felt obligated to help me, but she still wanted to deny me the satisfaction of being helped. She told me to sit down, and she would see what she could do -- all with an attitude as if I had infected my eyes intentionally for the sole purpose of slightly inconveniencing her. Then she made arrangements to get me in – I could see her talking to people and marking stuff on her calendar – but she never told me that that’s what she was doing. So I just sat there for about a half-hour and then a nurse called my name, and I got to see the doctor. The receptionist didn’t say another word to me. I spent, literally, fewer than five minutes with the doctor; she came in shined that little light in my eye, said, “you’ve got conjunctivitis,” wrote me a scrip, and sent me on my way. It cleared up in a few days with the medication.
But this time I’m not the one with the affliction; it’s my son Lil’ S1. They pulled him out of school on Wednesday because his eye was red and itchy, and I had to get him and take him to the doctor. It was an equally brief session with the doctor, but the receptionist was much more pleasant. Pinkeye is not a terrible malady, in that it typically goes away pretty quickly with antibiotics, and the afflicted party is no longer contagious after a few days of treatment, but in other ways it is quite annoying – especially for a three-year-old.
For one thing, it is highly contagious before the antibiotics go to work, so we were constantly slathering Lil’ S1 with hand sanitizer and washing our own hands and making sure not to rub our eyes. And we had to keep him away from his baby brother, which was also quite annoying. For another thing, the medication comes in drop form, and getting a three-year-old to let you put a drop in his eye is not the easiest thing in the world. The natural reaction is to close your eye and fight it to the bitter end, so you either have to do a "sneak attack," which is not ideal because in your haste you are likely to miss with the drop, or you have to hold him down and pry his eye open, which also is not ideal because it's really difficult to do, and because he acts like he's being waterboarded while it is going on. But we've been able to get them in somehow thus far, and it seems to be clearing up.
In other news, Prince died, as I'm sure you heard. I never completely "got" Prince. I mean, I get that he was influential -- as I read on FaceBook "Prince gave black people permission to be weird," which is very cool -- but I never really got his music, at least not like everybody else apparently did. Anytime a celebrity dies we have a tendency to lionize them and overstate the impact of their work, but with Prince it feels different. I think everybody genuinely loved him. I've heard the word "genius" used more times in the past few two days than I had in the entire year before that. When David Bowie died it was a pretty big deal, but not like this. Immediately after the news broke, I went on FaceBook and 19 of the first 20 posts in my feed were about Prince. That is nuts.
I liked Prince's style and creativity, but I thought his music was just kinda "yeah, it's pop" pop. I never got what distinguished it from that of any other contemporary pop artist. Everybody is talking about what a great guitarist he was, and that could very well be true, but a lot of his songs don't even sound guitar-y -- they sound synthpoppy, especially his '80s stuff that put him on the map. I do like some of his songs though. I actually really like "Cream," which for some reason I think real fans would tell me is minor Prince... oh well. His music is fun to dance to, as well.
Anyway, I'm not trying to speak ill of somebody who just passed, or be an annoying contrarian, or anything like that. I'm just giving you my honest opinion on the matter, which seems appropriate since the sole purpose of this blog is for me to opine on whatever I feel like opining about. Prince was important to a lot of people, and he was still relatively young and making new music and trying new things and finding new ways to be weird and interesting. We need more, not fewer, people like that in the world. R.I.P.
And with that... Until next time...
*You will have to excuse the Star Wars references. We just watched Return of the Jedi with Lil’ S1 – or tried to anyway. He couldn’t really follow what was going on, so unless there was an active fight in progress, he started getting bored. Eventually he started asking to watch something else (“I wanna watch Dinosaur King”), so we turned it off. It also didn’t help that S kept trying to shield his eyes during the particularly violent parts (and she was the one who wanted to put it one for him in the first place), but he wasn’t the least bit scared. I guess that’s one of the good things about not understanding it.
At the time I had a lousy health insurance plan under Kaiser Permanente, and if I went anywhere but this one Kaiser clinic I got hit with out-of-network fees, so I drove straight to the clinic from the airport, even though they don’t take walk-ins. The not-at-all-friendly woman at the desk said I would need to make an appointment, and they didn’t have anything open until the next day. I pleaded with her for a few minutes (she could clearly see I needed help), and then she did something people in her position often do that I don’t understand: She got me what I wanted, but she kept me in suspense about it. It's like she felt obligated to help me, but she still wanted to deny me the satisfaction of being helped. She told me to sit down, and she would see what she could do -- all with an attitude as if I had infected my eyes intentionally for the sole purpose of slightly inconveniencing her. Then she made arrangements to get me in – I could see her talking to people and marking stuff on her calendar – but she never told me that that’s what she was doing. So I just sat there for about a half-hour and then a nurse called my name, and I got to see the doctor. The receptionist didn’t say another word to me. I spent, literally, fewer than five minutes with the doctor; she came in shined that little light in my eye, said, “you’ve got conjunctivitis,” wrote me a scrip, and sent me on my way. It cleared up in a few days with the medication.
But this time I’m not the one with the affliction; it’s my son Lil’ S1. They pulled him out of school on Wednesday because his eye was red and itchy, and I had to get him and take him to the doctor. It was an equally brief session with the doctor, but the receptionist was much more pleasant. Pinkeye is not a terrible malady, in that it typically goes away pretty quickly with antibiotics, and the afflicted party is no longer contagious after a few days of treatment, but in other ways it is quite annoying – especially for a three-year-old.
For one thing, it is highly contagious before the antibiotics go to work, so we were constantly slathering Lil’ S1 with hand sanitizer and washing our own hands and making sure not to rub our eyes. And we had to keep him away from his baby brother, which was also quite annoying. For another thing, the medication comes in drop form, and getting a three-year-old to let you put a drop in his eye is not the easiest thing in the world. The natural reaction is to close your eye and fight it to the bitter end, so you either have to do a "sneak attack," which is not ideal because in your haste you are likely to miss with the drop, or you have to hold him down and pry his eye open, which also is not ideal because it's really difficult to do, and because he acts like he's being waterboarded while it is going on. But we've been able to get them in somehow thus far, and it seems to be clearing up.
In other news, Prince died, as I'm sure you heard. I never completely "got" Prince. I mean, I get that he was influential -- as I read on FaceBook "Prince gave black people permission to be weird," which is very cool -- but I never really got his music, at least not like everybody else apparently did. Anytime a celebrity dies we have a tendency to lionize them and overstate the impact of their work, but with Prince it feels different. I think everybody genuinely loved him. I've heard the word "genius" used more times in the past few two days than I had in the entire year before that. When David Bowie died it was a pretty big deal, but not like this. Immediately after the news broke, I went on FaceBook and 19 of the first 20 posts in my feed were about Prince. That is nuts.
[On his podcast "The Gist", Mike Pesca brought up a funny point: Prince is more famous than any actual prince.]
I liked Prince's style and creativity, but I thought his music was just kinda "yeah, it's pop" pop. I never got what distinguished it from that of any other contemporary pop artist. Everybody is talking about what a great guitarist he was, and that could very well be true, but a lot of his songs don't even sound guitar-y -- they sound synthpoppy, especially his '80s stuff that put him on the map. I do like some of his songs though. I actually really like "Cream," which for some reason I think real fans would tell me is minor Prince... oh well. His music is fun to dance to, as well.
Anyway, I'm not trying to speak ill of somebody who just passed, or be an annoying contrarian, or anything like that. I'm just giving you my honest opinion on the matter, which seems appropriate since the sole purpose of this blog is for me to opine on whatever I feel like opining about. Prince was important to a lot of people, and he was still relatively young and making new music and trying new things and finding new ways to be weird and interesting. We need more, not fewer, people like that in the world. R.I.P.
And with that... Until next time...
*You will have to excuse the Star Wars references. We just watched Return of the Jedi with Lil’ S1 – or tried to anyway. He couldn’t really follow what was going on, so unless there was an active fight in progress, he started getting bored. Eventually he started asking to watch something else (“I wanna watch Dinosaur King”), so we turned it off. It also didn’t help that S kept trying to shield his eyes during the particularly violent parts (and she was the one who wanted to put it one for him in the first place), but he wasn’t the least bit scared. I guess that’s one of the good things about not understanding it.
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