Lapsed Modernist

So I've had this sinusitis, and I finally went to my doctor on Monday, and they gave me antibiotics, and I took them and started feeling better in a couple of days, and then on Friday I woke up with a rash, and went back to the doctor, and it looked like an allergic reaction to the antibiotic I was taking, so the doctor prescribed me a different antibiotic to finish up with. Then we were talking about allergies, and I told him about the scary experience with my throat closing up over Christmas when I was at Saint Alp's Teahouse with klingrap and so he wrote me a prescription of an epipen just in case, and while we were at it he gave me a new prescription for the Albuterol inhaler, because I was out, and also I got my blood taken to do a foods allergy test (testing for 96 foods)--they should have the results in 10 days. None of this, including the prescriptions themselves and the labwork, cost me a cent.

This is by no means a novel idea, it's just something I think about almost every time I go to the doctor here. The Dutch health care system is an existing, functioning testament to the fact that all of the "complicated" negotiations over "health care reform" in the US are just bullshit, bullshit, and more bullshit. Okay, so Americans are atavistically in throes of The Red Scare, and politicians are using that to make sure that the US never has a government-run single-payer system like the NHS. But of course the real reason is that the politicians are bought and paid for by the HMOs, which run for profit, and now, in the awesome new synergy shat out by SCOTUS, in some escalating loop from hell, they will be able to invest tons of money into "electing" politicians that will ensure greater and greater profit margins. That is the core of the health care problem in the US, and it's not that I am being reductionist, it's that there is no more sophisticated analysis available for this particular issue. The false binary between HMOnsters and The Red Scare is about disabling any attempts at regulating profit margins by having a distracting Strawman debate about Free Market and Rugged Individualism vs. Collectivism & Stalin. Sure, there is other cultural stuff that maps onto that, like American willingness to embrace disenfranchisement, as long as their Black or Mexican neighbors are even MORE disenfranchised...but mostly it's about corporate profits in the large sense of What It's All About. American cultural false consciousness and penchant for voting against one's own interests is quirky and sometimes useful, but it's, like, not even on the radar of Why Things Really Happen.

Forget single-payer, forget the incredibly complicated multi-layer calculations with subsidizing a percentage of some health care plans and taxing some other health care plans, and some states getting funding in some complicated dealings over abortion in some other states, I meant what the fuck the point is, a reform where the end product would look like the Dutch system would be totally non-controversial, because there is nothing in it to use as fuel for inflating phobias and ignorant half-baked "applied politics" that are, like, an American culture-bound syndrome.

In the Netherlands health care is privatized, and it is mandatory for every individual over 18 to purchase it. The Dutch state also REGULATES THE FUCK OUT OF ITS HEALTHCARE SECTOR. There are 4 insurance companies in the country; they are all required by law to provide the same basic package to everyone, for the same price (around 90 EU/month). There is also a 150 EU annual deductible. That includes every kind of medical care you may need from your GP or specialist, any hospital visit, any test your doctor orders, and all prescriptions you have to fill. It covers limited dental and eye expenses (you can buy top-ups to get more covered) and unlimited therapy/mental health. There are no co-pays. There are things that insurance companies won't cover. For example, my coworker was complaining that her insurance company wouldn't pay for her to have a baby at the hospital, because she didn't have any medical indication for a hospital birth. I asked what she would do and she said she would have to pay for it out of pocket. I was, like, OMG because, of course, I am still in the US frame of mind where it costs thousands to have a baby (I saw my bill, which was accidentally sent to me instead of Mass Health, for Fionn's birth, which was midwife, rather than doctor-attended, and involved no medical interventions of any kind, and it was like $7000), but no, it turns out that here it costs around 300 EU to have a baby, out of pocket.

The companies definitely compete with each other; with one you may get a discount on a membership to a specific health club chain. With another you might get a discount towards a cruise or a spa. There are slightly different levels of coverage for alternative medicine. I pay about 20 EU more/month for my plan because I choose to have one that will reimburse me for medical care I may receive outside the Netherlands.

In terms of care, I have never had to wait longer than 24 hours for an appointment with my GP's office (with the only exception being when I request to see a specific doctor out of the three available there--then I might have to wait 2 or 3 days); usually if I call in the morning I can be seen the same day. The few times I've had to see specialists I had to wait between 7 and 10 days for an appointment. The only exception was a gyneocologist, where I would have had to wait 3 weeks for an appointment, and I ended up going to see a doctor in Germany instead, where an appointment was available the next business day, and the insurance will reimburse me. I have a wonderful therapist that I see every week, and there is no limit of sessions per year.

All the US would have to do to get this kind of model implemented would be to regulate the insurance companies. No boogeyman of the "government running healthcare," no phobias about socialism, no new insurance companies, no new agencies, just regulation: everyone has to buy a policy, and the basic policy has to cost the same reasonable amount, and cover everyone in the same way. And the public would love it--Gov't Protects People From Bloodsuckers! Gov't Reigns In Insurance Companies! People could have their Aetna or Blue Cross or whatever, they would just all pay something like $150/month, and never worry about copays or preexisting conditions or annual or lifetime spending caps or any of that bullshit.

There are systems that function well that fall that are neither the NHS nor the American HMOstrosity. It's just that "socialism" makes for a good scarecrow, and is better for obfuscating that the single, the ONLY reason that there is no "reform" happening is that both health care lobbies and politicians prioritize HMO profits, even as they pathetically try to append some secondary concerns about public impression management. Maybe the real question that people should be asking is--why is the American government unwilling to regulate the health care industry on the level of basic consumer protection? Well, because the more Aetna and BCBS make, the more money they can put into politicians' pockets, of course! Especially now! Thanks, SCOTUS!

I realized that I never wrote about my Christmas trip to the US, so here are the highlights, along with photos.

I left home in exhausted chaos of end-of-semester crap and missing passport awfulness, and made my way to Amsterdam where I paid my tax on my own stupidity, and picked up my new passport with a photo that is far less flattering than the wide-eyed photo of my 23-year old self taken in a mobile "photo studio," which was basically a sketchy van outside the American consulate in Guatemala City. I had dinner with Niki and Alana, and slept over at Alana's, waking up at some ungodly hour for my flight to Boston, where I arrived, exhausted, and made my way to redheadedmuse's house, where I decompressed for 24 hours, caught up and gossiped with her and thoroughbass, ate delicious homemade yoghurt, participated in a photo extravaganza downstairs at mzrowan's house, and took some other random photos, of which I like this one the best:



The next day I made my way to New York City, after some confusion with busses (Bolt Bus or Megabus, can't remember which, had relocated their pick=up location from South Station to Back Bay since the last time I had availed myself of their services, trying to figure out who had tickets for what time was confusing, finally I went with my old buddy Lucky Star, lured by their promises of new exciting on-board wifi, of which there was no evidence in reality, but it did get me to NYC in a reasonable amount of time).

For the next almost-a-week I proceeded to camp out on apropos' air mattress (with one night's exception--more about that in a second) in La Casa de apropos and missmimesis and also the former official/current de facto casa de msmsgirl, basking in the glow of nightly Hannukah candles, and the shimmering of the Christmas Ideology Tree (thusly named because the top decoration on the tree looked to us like a Deleuzean rhizome).


aprpose, with tree in the background


The Menorah

We ate Thai food and sushi, spent hours at a retro-ish Morningside Heights diner with apropos' friend Gorgeous whom I had finally met, played in the snow, went to a party. Also in the midst of all of this I went to see the movie adaptation of "Youth In Revolt" with totalvirility, who had screen passes. Anyone who knows me knows that this has been one of my favorite books since my senior year of high school, back when it was still totally a cult favorite. It had been TotalV's favorite since freshman year of college, when I lent it to him. We were both appalled by the adaptation, but I guess it was inevitable. It is impossible to make that book into a Hollywood movie, even an "edgy" Hollywood movie.( thoughts on the movie vs. the book, not really spoilerish )

ANYway. here are missmimesis and msmsgirl


on the fire escape


and with a switcheroo in the focus


missmimesis again

My second or third day in NYC I went to see my beautiful singer friend akozorez (who gifted me with the most amazing, warmest, most beautiful hand-made Victorian-ish, steampunk-ish neck warmer) in the village, where outside of Yaffa we discovered the following message, which I suspected the Universe was sending her way:




here she is contemplating it


our kitschy fairyland, Yaffa

In the winter there are all kinds of fairlyland windows all over the East Village.


here is one


I went to the Strand

and bought the following books: Revenge by Mary Morris who is kind of hit or miss for me, but I keep reading everything she writes, although so far she hasn't written anything better than Night Sky, but it's the sort of slow psychological suspense study that I like, with my favorite themes of memory and obsession, then China Mieville's The Scar which I finally finished, and liked a lot, but not as much as Perdido Street Station, and The Glister which I got because I had read it mentioned on jactitation's year-end meme, the synopsis sounded interesting, but unfortunately it went AWOL in theophile's parents' house and so I haven't read it. I almost bought The Year of the Flood but it was pricy and heavy, and in the end I didn't.

Oh--so the one night I did not spent in Morningside Heights, I spent, improbably, at the W hotel in midtown, where my college friend who is now a Fancy Lawyer got a room for the night, as she drove in from Philadelphia to see me. It was so wonderful to see her and catch up. But oh my god the hotel! obviously, because of my lifestyle choices it is not often that I end up immersed in total American Psycho Corporate Hell, so it was sort of an ethnographically interesting experience, but also so over the top that it wasn't just my usual finely attuned Matrix geiger counter that was beeping, that place was like this parody of a place.

( cut for Explicit Corporate Trauma )

As a counter-part to the gray hotel I spent some time in my erstwhile workplace, The Peace Pentagon, a.k.a. the War Resisters' League building on Lafayette, where the Deep Dish TV (and Paper Tiger TV) offices are located, up the stairs decorated with signs that date back to the Vietnam anti-war movement. I saw Maoist Boss, who is awesome as ever, and his amazing stepdaughter, who is more awesome than ever, whom I last saw as she was heading off to Stanford. She is now finishing Stanford, and is this brilliant, effervescent young woman, who was telling us about a reproductive/sexual health research project she did in Kenya, with a sophistication that led Babs and me to tell her that she should consider becoming a medical anthropologist, but she really wants to go to medical school and be a doctor so that she can perform abortions for women who have a hard time accessing those services. She is really a wonder. More like her, please.

Oh, and related to Maoist Boss but also to EVERYTHING ELSE, pnts moved to New York!!! At first it looked like we would miss each other by like a day but then it turned out that she got there at the same time I got there, and we were reunited! I finally met her husband, and we squealed and beeped at each other and acted in our usual delighted-goofy seeing each other way. And she wore my new rainbow hat at a brunch place in Williamsburg:



And we went for drinks to some crossover NYU/dive bar on Spring (I think) with her and apropos and after that for DELICIOUS PIEROGIES at Odessa.



I also had all too brief but wonderful time seeing labrujah and klingrap (and scared the crap out of the latter, I think, by having an allergic reaction to "milk tea" at St. Alf's Teahouse on 13th street, and really, Teahouse Staff, if your customer asks you what was in the tea because her throat is closing up saying "oh, I don't know, it's some kind of non-dairy mixture in a big vat so I can't look up the ingredients for you" is not the correct response), went to Beacon's Closet, missed some people I hope to see next time, saw erstwhile Chair and sadly missed cyberanya who decamped for Germany on the very day I arrived, and Ms. Palindrome who I had thought was away, but apparently was not. Alas.

After NYC I made my way back to Boston on a bus that took like eleventy billion hours to get back to Boston, spent a truncated night in Newburyport before getting up at 3.30 AM to catch the airport shuttle to Logan again, with Fionn, to visit my parents in Chicago, where Fionn had his first Christmas tree experience. That was great, despite a fiasco with a promised train set (somehow instead of the approved Brio wooden train set a made-in-China Thomas the Engine crapola was purchased, from the same line that was recalled in 2007 for lead in the paint). Fionn also kept putting on ALL OF MY MOTHER' S JEWELRY AT ONCE which I photodocumented:







After five days there we came back to Boston, rather late in the evening, and headed to beginnersmind's house, where Fionn was reunited with his first ever real playmate from their wee days, Maiya, who was born mere days after him in the same birth center, in the same room.


beginnersmind and Maiya


Maiya and Fionn, in the background

Maiya had these awesome helium balloons that Fionn was entranced with:









Then I dropped Fionn off with theophile, went to see my chiropractor, Dr. Marty, in Wellesley, saw, in a whirlwind, a bunch of other friends and nears and dears, and, gloriously, was escorted to the airport by the lovely legitimatelove and her little ones, and I am so happy I got to catch up with her, even if it was too rushed/hectic/not enough time.

But with friends, and loved ones, and loved cities, it is always not enough time.

And then the next day I was in Berlin for new year's, and I was jet-lagged and sick for much of the time I was there, basically after the first night/day my hosts and I were all sick and just chilled out and took group baths in Neukolln (which is why I didn't get in touch with the two of you I meant to see--heresiarch and shaherezada), and then my rideshare to Dusseldorf took so long because of the snow on the roads that I missed the last train home and spent the night in the Dusseldorf train station, which, as I discovered, pretty much occupies the same demographic/existential zip code as the American Greyhound stations at night. As I was telling my friend/coworker pH about the neo-nazi dude tweaking on meth who kept approaching me and standing in front of me, but I wouldn't raise my eyes from my book to look at him, so basically it was like his crotch kept sailing into my field of vision, and then moving away, and the two Turkish dudes blowing up condoms and popping them (all this accompanied by running racist commentary from two appalled middle-aged Russian women who kept talking to, presumably, their families on a cell phone and saying things like "it's like a zoo, every race of monkeys is represented"), he asked, in all seriousness, if I wasn't scared, because Dusseldorf train station at night is such a scary place.

This is funny not only because out of all the sketchy places I've been in my life, Dusseldorf train station isn't even on the map, but also (and mostly) because in two weeks he is leaving his sheltered bougie apartment and his cello and going to Kinshasa to visit his fiancee for two months. When I told her about his totally serious scared-for-me query about the train station, she joked that it would be funny to leave him in the Kinshasa airport for a couple of hours after arrival.

He is a sweetie, though. I hope he fares well in the DRC!

That there are already reports of how people are "looting" for food. That's right, black people loot. White people "survive under difficult circumstances." It's really like Katrina all over again, except on a much grander, more terrible scale. The global scale of just how far the divide between the rich and the poor is.

That people tearfully ask "how could this happen to people who have suffered so much?" Smart people ask this--and the question ignores the structural injustices that underlie both the damage from the earthquake and the other forms of suffering that somehow make it cosmically unfair that there is an earthquake ON TOP of all that. These things are all related. The dire poverty and the lack of infrastructure are a legacy of colonialism and a consequence of global neocolonialism; so is the fact that the city was built to accommodate 50,000 people, before there was adequate knowledge about how to build cities in seismographically vulnerable zones--and then the same global economic processes that have created megacities and megaslums turned Port-au-Prince into an impoverished city of over a million people. And no one cares if infrastructure is inadequate in poor black cities. Not the building codes in Haiti, not the levees in New Orleans. (And this is not even talking about the millions of global impoverished who have to trade off land security for things like health and basic minimum environmental standards, and live on toxic dumps, in the paths of landslides, and on volcano slopes--because everywhere else they would be priced out or just kicked out). Pat Robertson is so retarded it doesn't even make me angry--I mean it's Pat fucking Robertson, what do you expect? He is a moron. What is more upsetting to me is how people close their eyes to the very real structural, historical and contemporary reasons for why it is the world's poor that pay the heaviest price for "acts of God."

That there is so much focus in American media on the handful of American students who are missing there, and on the handful of babies who were in the process of adoption and how will they get to the States now, or on the American missionaries and how they are having a hard time helping people? I understand that to some extent the focus will be on a nation's citizens, and I hope all the students are found, and the babies are airlifted, but Jesus Christ, this is not an American tragedy--the faces of these Lynn University students are all over the news, there are private rescue teams looking for them--how is it that they are singled out as victims for the spotlight, and as they are found, their rescue to the DR on helicopters is publicized--when there are no helicopters, no food, no water, nothing except cohabiation on the streets with decomposing corpses for thousands of people whom no one will ever help? Yes of course there are stories about the general state of things but as far as putting the faces on the tragedy--how are most of the faces white or somehow American-affiliated?

If you are still looking for a place to donate, I recommend Paul Farmer's organization, Partners In Health.


http://www.standwithhaiti.org/haiti

December 7 Blog find of the year. That gem of a blog you can't believe you didn't know about until this year.

Oh man, I don't know. regretsy.com and givemesomethingtoread.com

Also the transcendental CEFAD section of Jezebel, but it's more like a sporadic column than anything regular.

I am also weirdly private about some blogs I like, and some of those fit the bill, but I am not going to post about them on a public entry.

December 5 Night out. Did you have a night out with friends or a loved one that rocked your world? Who was there? What was the highlight of the night?

Well the most amazing night, on all kinds of deep phenomenological levels was a certain evening in Norway (hard to say night when most of this night transpired under the summer arctic sun)--it is described in full detail in a locked entry from August, and I will leave it at that in this public entry...let's just say it involved shum_listvi, a tiny island in the middle of a fjord, and epic troll battles on the rock faces around us. Runners-up include the night in London when khalinche and I went to see "Arcadia" and then, on our walk afterwards, witnessed the full moon, positioned as the iris in the middle of the London Eye, and filled our bellies full with delicious Middle Eastern food, and the second night that kaecyy and Lea were here, when we wandered around Maastricht, and picnicked on the stone wall overlooking the river as the sun set, then indulged in delicious ice-cream at Luna Rossa, then they set off firecrackers in the backyard for the midnight that marked the start of my birthday--then a few hours later my coworker girlfriends arrived with the dilapidated food organ in tow, for my whim of garden decoration.

December 4 Book. What book - fiction or non - touched you? Where were you when you read it? Have you bought and given away multiple copies?

I was trying to remember what I read this year...there were a few things. For one, I started Lionel Shriver's "We Need to Talk About Kevin" in December of last year but I think I finished it in January of this year...I got it out of the public library and thought it was excellent.

Also, I am having a total memory lapse about a book that I read THIS SUMMER and really liked, yet cannot remember the title or author, and googling doesn't seem to help. I remember the plot very well, though, so hopefully someone can remind me what this book is. It is a really dark coming-of-age story about a girl growing up on a tiny island, where her father is a prison warden, and her mother is a frustrated ambitious perfectionist, who has been bleaching the girl's hair since she was six weeks old. The girl has a granmother in Los Angeles, who sends her movie magazines, and has exciting stories about Hollywood in the 1930s. The narrative goes back and forth between the story of this teenage girl on the island, and the story of the grandmother, when she was young, the daughter of a migrant refugee from Mexico, growing up in Los Angeles, and falling into the brothel industry around Hollywood movie sets. I gave it to khalinche to read, and I don't think she liked it as much as I did (but maybe she remembers it?)--I thought it had its problems, and was a bit uneven, especially in its discourse about sex work, but overall I thought it was partly an excellent book about structures of exploitation, partly an anti-fairy-tale, partly the darkest sort of satire. It has a kind of chick-lit cover to it, but was most definitely not chick lit. I got it at this charity thrift store in Leeds, and read most of it there, finishing it on the train to London.

And I am behind, so I have to do the first three days today...

This is The Best of 2009 Blog Challenge.

How to participate:

1. Write on one or all thirty-one of the prompts below for the month of December
2. A post can be a sentence, photo or 3,000 word essay
3. Tag your posts and photos #best09. Follow others sharing their stories from the year. There's a widget at the bottom of the post aggregating mentions of the tag on Twitter.

Share your best moments of 2009 over the course of December. Don't get hung up on details or length - if there's an aspect of the question that doesn't resonate, change it to meet your needs.
( day-by-day prompts below the cut )

Dec. 1: Trip--I think my best trip this year was the Berlin/Norway trip in the summer. I had a wonderful, eclectic time in Berlin, balancing between a really interesting conference and random plans with a lively variety of people, occupying totally different and largely non-overlapping corners of the Berlin universe. i saw an amazing blues show, ate copious amounts of dirt cheap and delicious sushi, babysat a bunch of kids, visited a four-story thirftstore, and every day was filled with meaningful conversations, politically and personally. Plus Berlin in the summer is so magical and green and slow and relaxed and perfect for night walks along the canal, with trees assuming anthropolomorphic shapes and circus wagons huddled up in the darkness. Then onto Norway where I visited shum_listvi's wooden witchy house, and we embarked on a picaresque/psychodelic adventure, a road trip through the fjords, the birch woods, the abandoned houses surrounded by bushes and bushes of ripe raspberries and moss and trees growing on the roofs. It was one of the most magical places I have ever been.

Dec. 2:Restaurant moment--oh there are so many! The nostalgic satisfaction of the Middle Eastern platter amidst the kitch-sparkle of Yaffa, fish tagines in Morocco, feeding the staff of an ice-cream parlor blood oranges in Paris with rezendi, but again I am going to have to go with the Berlin sushi in Neukölln, because it was so delicious, plentiful and cheap--an impossible trifecta anywhere else. Spicy tuna rolls and spider rolls and rainbow rolls and eel and avocado rolls...I am salivating just thinking about it. I got it as take-out and ate it with a bunch of bohemians and a three-year old with what is clearly a sophisticated pallette, followed by red wine, tea, whiskey, more red wine, more tea.

Dec. 3: Article--well, like everyone I got the LOLS from that op-ed where a right-wing douchebag proclaimed that Stephen Hawking wouldn't have a chance under the UK healthcare system. But I think the most important article of last year is Bait and switch: How the “public option” was sold, both because it is an excellent analysis, and because it offers empirical proof to counter the discursive Orwellian re-memorying of "the public option was never on the table" and "American legislators cannot produce a strong public option" etc. etc.

Living entities are at the different stages of progressing through autumn. Naked slick wet black trees, with their fractal branches, stand right next to the rich auras of yellow golden leaves in ornate shapes. A mixed-up tree is afire with a cluster of reds on one side, then browning, compromised green with flashes of yellow all over the rest. It gets dark early, low flocks of birds rapidly passing overhead seem like mercury-colored shadows projected onto the sky from the gray water below. On the tour boat decks, people are shivering, but if you walk down to where the houseboats are docked, people are reading newspapers and eating sandwiches with cheese in these lit-up bells bobbing up and down, in the early evening darkness.

Fionn asks to go for a bike ride, but it's already too dark. I helped him gather leaves, they are drying in some books, which ones I already forgot, but later in the winter we can start making his first herbarium.

Soups, I must make lots of hearty soups, it is that season.

Here is an autumnal picture I took a couple of weeks ago.

I came home from work tonight to find Fionn sitting on the chair in the living room, strumming his (baby) guitar and singing Pink Floyd. He is such a proto-teenager! Also when I started singing along he stopped and said very forcefully "Don't, mama. Don't sing along."

and, unrelatedly, one more fruit of freelensing:

12:14 PM

me: Fionn found a ginger root in the bed and is cracking up over it
apropos: haha that is funny. why is there ginger in bed?
me: that's my fault
me: I think I lost it there.
me: now Fionn is freaking out because the ginger got confiscated. he is crying and repeating over and over "want it, want ginger"

12:18 PM

me: oh no now he wants to take the ginger root for a walk