Entry 758: Medicals

Finger update: My fracture has "healed" in the sense that the break is no longer detectable, but my finger is still very tender and swollen. I have really bad edema. It's not just a crossword puzzle word. This "Build up of fluid" or "Bodily swelling" is a very real thing. I can't quite make a fist, and if I bang my pinkie on something the right wrong way, it really smarts. I get that jolt of "electric" pain that courses through my entire arm for a microsecond.

It's really remarkable to me how long this thing is taking to get back to 100%. It happened over six weeks ago. By contrast, my son's little buddy fractured his heel three weeks ago and had to wear a walking boot for a bit, and he's already running around again. Kids are like little Wolverines, with their amazing regenerative powers, and they don't even realize it. That's one of the great ironies/tragedies of life. When you are at the peak of your physical powers, you aren't mentally developed enough to appreciate it. That's the problem with youth: It's wasted on the young.

I'm doing physical therapy for my finger, which is weird to me, but it seems to be helping. I haven't had a lot of success with physical therapy in the past. I've done it several times for my shoulder and on all occasions I ended up quitting because it's very time-consuming and expensive, and I wasn't seeing the results I was hoping for. It's possible I just wasn't patient enough, but it also was $50-$75 a session, and they wanted me to come at least twice a week. It's hard to justify paying that much for something that isn't doing a whole lot, and which I could do 90% of at my house for free. I still do daily stretches for my shoulder. It's been years, and it's definitely not back to normal, but it's probably better than it would be if I just did nothing. I don't know. I'm at the point now where trying to "fix" it is more burdensome to my life than working around it.

With my finger, however, I'm experiencing tangible improvement, and the sessions are only $5. I have no idea why it's so much cheaper. Maybe it's because it's just my finger; maybe it's because I'm doing it on-site at a little clinic in the doctor's office, as opposed to at a large center devoted strictly to physical therapy. I don't know. It's one of the many mysteries of our medical system. Unless you are willing and able to devote hours of your life studying the minute details of your insurance plan and the policies of the medical practice you're utilizing, you probably have no idea what you're paying for or why, and you don't know how much until your bill comes.

A great example of what I'm talking about: earlier this week I got a bill for $100. I asked the front desk what it was for, and they couldn't even tell me. They had to call the billing specialist who works remotely. Turns out it was for the splint they gave me for my finger. Now, first off, this thing only costs $26.99 on Amazon, so the fact that I got charged $100 for it is absolutely ridiculous. But even worse, in my opinion, is that nobody told me I would have to pay for it at all, let alone that it would be so much. The doctor just gave it to me and told me to use it. So, that's what I did.

It's all such a racket. And the thing is, if I complained to my insurance company and the doctor's office, if I made enough noise, I might be able to get the charge reduced. But at what cost? Likely a significant one, considering I put a high premium on my free-time. I'd rather be out the $73.01 than waste my time dealing with it. I have a colleague who fights everybody tooth and nail for every last cent if he feels he's getting a raw deal, and part of me admires that, but another part of me is like, that's way too much work. It's basically like having a shitty, low-paying part-time job, and I don't need nor want a shitty, low-paying part-time job at this moment in my life.

Alright, that's all for today. Pretty busy weekend. We have some friends in town visiting, we have a gala to attend later (oo la la, tres chic), and Lil' S2 and his friend have bothering me since before I got out of bed (literally) to take them to some place called House of Cards.

Until next time...

Entry 757: The End Of A Freeloading Era

This is the end
Beautiful friend
This is the end
My only friend, the end

My parents' long-canceled cable credentials have finally stopped working. I knew this day would come, and so it has. Yet, I rue not my loss, rather I celebrate what was mine for so long.

Some years ago, I don't remember exactly when, probably around 2016, my parents bought a cable subscription from a company called Click! Network. When we came out to visit once, my dad gave me the credentials to watch something on my tablet, and I just kept using them after we left. It was perfect because Click! was one of the few online providers that never initiated two-factor authentication. For a while, I used my friend JY's Xfinity account, but they started making me put in a text message code every time I logged in, and so I would have to text him to text me the code they texted him, and it just got to be too annoying, presumably for the both of us. But Click! didn't require that extra step. I could just put in the user name and password and start watching -- ESPN, TNT, TBS, FS1, and every now and then NFL Network would work for some reason, even though it wasn't included in the package. It was great.

Then, maybe three years ago, I was talking to my dad, and I mentioned that I still used his cable credentials, and he told me, much to my surprise, that he canceled their Click! account several years before that. So, doing the math, they probably canceled it around 2019, which means that I used cable credentials from a defunct account for about six years. That is a damn good freeloading run. The credentials just kept working. At first, I thought to myself Surely, this is the time they fail. But then they didn't, and so I started expecting them to work, and they did, right up until five days ago. I tried to log-in to TNT to watch a basketball game, and they don't even list Click! as an acceptable provider anymore. Then I tried ESPN, and Click! is still listed as a provider, but when I click the link, I just get a useless blank white box on the screen. It's possible that if I could get the Click! credentials box to pop up, like it used to, my parents' credentials would still work, but I can't figure out how to do that, and I can't exactly call tech support about it. So, I'm just accepting the L on this one, because it's not really an L. It's a glorious W that finally ended.

Nevertheless, this whole thing left me ESPN-less, and that wouldn't do, as ESPN is a must-have for live sports watchers like me. The Mother Ship might be losing its influence in the world of sport in other ways, but it is still very much a leader in live product, with Monday Night Football, the college football playoffs, the NBA playoffs, and the NHL playoffs, among other programming. It's also one of the few remaining pure cable channels, which makes it a super annoying must-have. To my knowledge -- and I just researched it fairly extensively -- there is no way to stream ESPN without buying a full-on cable package. It's not available with any other streaming service, and it's not offered as a standalone product. You might think it is, because they have something called ESPN+, but you would be wrong. ESPN+ is the most blatant case of fraudulent advertising since Lionel Hutz's case against the movie The Never Ending Story. Despite the name, ESPN+ doesn't actually contain ESPN. It's just a different network with less popular programming. It's like if Apple marketed their watch as the iPhone+.

So, I broke down and bought a subscription to something called Sling TV. It was the only service I could find that allows me to stream ESPN for under $50 a month. It's $110 for three months, but I think that's just a promotional rate, and I'll have to pay about $10 more per month after that. So, if I want to keep it, I'll have to decide whether I'm going to pay more or do the thing where you unsubscribe and subscribe anew with a different email address to get the promotional rate again. If I used all my and all S's email accounts, I could stretch it out a few years, and then maybe by that time there will be a better option. Or maybe if I just click the button to unsubscribe, they'll offer to extend the promotional rate. That's what happened with the New York Times. They sent me an email telling me my trial period was over, and I would soon be getting charged substantially more, so I turned off auto-renewal, and immediate got another email essentially saying, Psych! You can keep paying what you're paying now. We were just joking.

One thing I learned from all this is that despite all the cord-cutting and the advent of individual network streaming services, bundled TV packages are still very much a thing, and they are still very much overpriced. YouTube TV is like $85 a month; Fubo is the same; and the physical cable providers are even more expensive -- at least I think so. We get Verizon internet, so I decided to see what their TV packages are, and even after going to their website, I honestly have no idea. It's just a garbled, busy mess. One reason I went with Sling is because they have each channel explicitly listed in their various packages and the cost is clearly stated. It seems like every provider would do that, but that is not the case at all.  And Sling is still screwing me. They offer two standard packages (Orange and Blue) and one has ESPN (Orange) and the other one has FS1 and NFL Network and NFL Red Zone (Blue). So, I can't buy ESPN by itself, but I also can't buy it with the other sports channels I would want. Well, I could. I could buy their combo package (Orange and Blue), but then I'd be up near the $85 per month price point like I would with any of the other providers. It's a real racket.

What I should do is just eschew live sports altogether. It wouldn't be total unheard of -- I pretty much did this all throughout college. I just did math all the time and was pretty happy (not many dates, though). I've actually thought about doing this again -- not math necessarily but something else. Like, what if every time I got the urge to watch sports, I read instead, or watched a movie. What if I just gave up watching sports altogether? It sounds good in theory, but in practice I don't think it would work. The Seahawks would be playing the 49ers on Monday Night Football, and I would be sitting there trying to read, wondering what's happening in the game. Then I would pull out my phone and follow the play-by-play transcript, which is worse. I mean, if you're going to waste three hours of your life watching a game, at least you can watch the game, right? It's much more pathetic to waste it watching a little football icon move across a graphic of a field, while you wait for the latest text update. Play under review?! What do you mean? What's going on?   

Until next time...

Entry 756: TV

It's still difficult to type, but that's just how it's going to be until this damn finger heals. If you would have told me when it first happened that my pinky would still be purple and swollen a month later, I never would have believed you. It felt like a few-days type of thing -- a week tops. That's probably a big part of the problem. I didn't think it was that bad, so I didn't go to the doctor immediately like I should have (despite the urging of a colleague and my wife). I have a follow-up with a sports injury specialist on Tuesday, so I'll just keep it splinted and make do until then. Not much else I can do. Man, getting old sucks. 

In other news, there is a lot going on in the world right now, so naturally I'm going to write about a TV show that went off the air nearly four years ago. We recently finished watching Brooklyn Nine-Nine as a family -- all 153 episodes. I probably watched "only" about 140 of them, because when I was away they would watch without me, but somehow I was always able to hop right back into the story, hardly missing a beat (which reminds of one of my favorite The Onion headlines of all time). Overall, I found the series quite funny and enjoyed it much more than I thought I would. Captain Raymond Holt, played masterfully by Andre Braugher (RIP), is an all-time great sitcom character, and Charles Boyle (Joe Lo Truglio) was a hit with the kids.

Also, kudos to Stephanie Beatriz who plays Rosa Diaz. It's not that Rosa is such a tremendous character (although she is funny); it's that I've seen Beatriz in other things, and I can't believe she's the same person who plays this laconic, streetwise detective. I mean, she's the lead in Encanto, which just doesn't compute to me. There are really good actors, who are just kinda always versions of themselves -- like Tom Cruise is always Tom Cruise and De Niro is always De Niro -- and then there are others who cause a mental disconnect when you see them in different roles. It's why I thought Bryan Cranston should have won the Emmy every season for Breaking Bad. His sizzle real should have been clips of Walter White ("I am the one who knocks!") interspersed with reminders that he is the same guy who played the dad in Malcolm in the Middle. Beatriz is definitely in the Cranston camp, and it's super impressive.

The only major demerit on Brooklyn Nine-Nine is that the final season is straight trash. This happens to almost all great TV shows (*ahem* The Office), and Brooklyn Nine-Nine follows the same "jumping the shark" playbook -- the big names leave the show or take diminished roles; a bunch of characters start having babies or getting married or getting divorced; the small things that worked previously get brought to the forefront and played to death -- but it also had the added weirdness of unfolding in 2020 and 2021, when we were all kinda losing our minds with Covid restrictions and performative social justice expectations. It's so cringey to watch these episodes now. You can just feel the struggle of the writers trying to cater to the du jour anti-police sentiment while making a show in which cops are the explicit protagonists. Every stagy scene of self-flagellation (and there are plenty of them) made me think This is why Trump won reelection. I don't actually believe that, but I don't not believe it either. The kids were dead-set on finishing the series or else I would have applied my ABE principle of TV viewing: Always Bail Early.

In other TV news, the White Lotus Season 3 finale dropped last Sunday night, and despite being exhausted from helping to administer the ACPT again, I watched it as soon as it was available. This season has been pretty heavily criticized in the media (at least the media I consume), and having some time to reflect on it all, I must reluctantly admit: The haters are more right than they are wrong. I mean, I still enjoyed this season, but it's a B-, whereas the first two seasons are an A and A+, respectively.

One of the major knocks on the season is that it's way too boring and slow, even by Mike White standards. It could have been two episodes shorter was a common refrain. I typically don't mind a slow plot as long as the characters move and grow, but therein lies the biggest problem I had with this season. With a few exceptions (e.g., Saxon), I didn't feel like any of the major characters had fully realized story arcs. They all had isolated moments of excellence -- great one-off scenes and pull-out dialogues (Mike White is a master of this) -- but within the overall narrative context, it often felt like they were just running in place. I swear Mook and Gaitok have the same basic conversation every episode until the finale. It's like c'mon, we've already seen this, multiple times. What's next? And that was the entire series for me. I kept thinking Okay, here we go! This is when they're really gonna pull me in! But it just never happened. It almost did, in the finale, which I quite enjoyed, but there was too much to do at that point. It was all so unsatisfying. Almost every character felt undercooked or subject to a forced, unearned resolution.

Also, there's just so much throughout the series that doesn't make sense, from a basic human behavioral standpoint -- people doing things that nobody would ever do just because it's needed for the plot. I can't really say any more than that without giving major spoilers, which I don't want to do. If you've seen the season, you surely know what I mean. It comes off as lazy storytelling. I don't think it was, but that's how it comes off. I'm a big Mike White fan, but this one was a swing and a miss -- well, maybe not a miss, but it was weak contact to be sure. It happens. Nobody bats a thousand.

Until next time...

Entry 755: Fractured Finger

This will be a short entry. The finger injury (right pinky) I mentioned in a previous entry turned out to be a fracture, and so I have to wear a brace that makes it very difficult to type. This is when I wish I was a hunt-and-peck typist. But I'm not. I'm an asdfjkl; guy, and so it's really unnatural and difficult for me to have two fingers (my pinky in "buddy bound" with my ring finger in the brace) taken out of the equation. Plus, I have to cock my right wrist at a weird angle to keep my brace from inadvertently hitting random keys. I can manage, but it's tiring and annoying, and I swear I can feel myself actively developing carpal tunnel syndrome. So, for now I'll probably only type when I'm doing my actual job that somebody pays me to do.

Actually, I just had a thought: I could use my phone. That would probably be easier, but typing out an entire blog entry on a phone doesn't sound that appealing either. Maybe I'll try it next week though. Check back then.

Until next time...