But Call Me Betsy

Shawn and I went to Body Worlds last night. The body shown here was at one time a real human person who decided to give his/her flesh and bones to Dr. Gunther van Hagens. Dr. Hagens developed and perfected the art of plastination which, according to the Web site "makes it possible to preserve individual tissues and organs that have been removed from the body of the deceased as well as the entire body itself." The process stops the body from decomposing and you can stand inches away from it looking at the red lines of the musculature or gaze at an entire family of bodies shaped only out of bundles of tiny red capillaries. This might be a friend of yours, who knows. They had glass cases and cases of preserved organs and bones too, both healthy and unhealthy--the message was, Don't smoke (blackened lungs) and don't get too fat (they had a sliced up body of a 540 pound person to illustrate the strain subcutaneous fat puts on the internal organs). The most amazing thing w...

I love lying backward in a chair with a dental dam and six sharp instruments stuck in my mouth along with a suction cup that's vacuuming off my cheek and two guys hovering above me holding bright lights. Let's do that for about an hour. The dentist had me wear those huge grandma cataract sunglasses but the gunk still splattered in my eyes. I kept thinking, What if something goes horribly awry and I die like this? I don't know what the cause could be--an allergic reaction to a chemical or maybe suffocation from the rubber sheet they stretched over my face (for real. One thing that did happen was the dentist almost cut my lip off with the scissors as he was trimmming the sheet so I could breath out of my nose). Anyway, I decided I would be a sad case if I died because I was trying to be so cheerful ahead of time, joking about how I had pureed turkey for Thanksgiving just to be sure I didn't damage my tooth any further, ha haha hahahahha. He showed me a video of what would...

We heard a case today that shook me up. I can't give details because of privacy issues, but it involved the loss of a child in an accident that one of the parent's feels responsible for causing. I don't know how a person survives grief that complicated; the death of a child on top of believing it was your fault. How many times would you replay that moment over and over again in your head, rewriting it so that you don't make the same mistake? I do that now with stupid stuff I should or shouldn't have said or done but the consequences are minor. These are not easy meetings to attend every week--there's always a detail or two that haunts; a brother wanting to lay in the hospital bed next to his dead sibling, a father brushing his daughter's hair before she goes to the OR, someone who walked in the Emergency Room talking to the attendants but who won't walk out again. So, yeah, I guess my root canal today at 5 isn't that big of a deal.

"That would be great ..." I could cut and paste about 20+ e-mails I've received with that phrase un-ironically used. I could list about 500 things from my job that would make you wonder if I was being satirical. I won't though. I can't. If you saw last night's episode of The Office you'll remember that the boss gets access to his employees e-mails. Guess what? I've experienced that actuality in my non-sitcom life. So, I'm a little skeptical about this whole "freedom of speech" thing. Not many people here today as it's Thanksgiving tomorrow. I wonder if, as will probably happen at Shawn's work, we'll all be told to go home a little early, enjoy ourselves, hey, maybe we should cut out early for a drink? Hmmm...I wonder... In other news, we're going to Bushkill, PA for Thanksgiving tomorrow. Bushkill is a lovely name for a town. It's about 2 or more hours away and so we'll leave here about noon, eat, then turn around...

That statement is for those of you who insist on riding their non-reflective bikes at night while wearing black hoodies and black pants. I'm very proud of you for conserving gasoline and remaining fit, but I CAN'T SEE YOU. Now that it's dark at like 3:30 each day, by the time I'm driving home from work, it's pitch black. There's been more than one time that I've jumped in surprise at bicyclers swerving out of nowhere and speeding off in the dark, visible only if you catch the whites of their eyes. I don't want to commit accidental vehicular manslaughter because some hipster insists on riding his midnight blue Schwinn home from an early happy hour at Sugar Mom's. While I'm on the subject, it will not be my fault if I hit you in my car because you're riding down the street against traffic. And if you insist on talking on your cell phone while doing this, you most certainly should be at least grazed by my bumper. Other possible circumstances for...

Yay! I went to the dentist yesterday and was told by Dr. Henry of the visible nostril hair that I need a root canal on the tooth whose filling I lost in Mexico. Dr. Henry was not pleased with the state of my gums either and gave me a serious dressing down for not seeing the dentist more regularly. I said, "But I didn't have insurance. I had to pay my rent first." He said, "You could've worked out a payment plan." I think he was forgetting that I hate dentists and would rather have my teeth rot out then go to one and pay for it out of pocket with money that could be better spent on student loans and red wine. I did like Dr. Henry on the whole. He gave me extra Novacaine on my request. It looks like my mouth will require about $10,000 worth of work before I'm able to smile freely again. Only you can stop gingivitis. So, I liked the doctor okay, but I hate everything about being at the dentist. It's so primitive. I feel like any second he's going to...

I got into an imaginary fight with a girl at the gym yesterday, this twit on the stair machine talking on her cell phone. Did you know that Megan doesn't know that her boyfriend cheated on her? I know! I know! I can't believe it either. There are levels of cell phone rudeness. I'd say that talking on your phone in a public space is slightly rude (though I am guilty of the walk-n-talk). The next level would be talking on your cell phone in an enclosed public space such as restaurant or a subway where people can't easily get away from your conversation. The next step is talking on your cell phone in an enclosed public space LOUDLY. Like, Sorry, I have to shout but I can't hear you over the sound of the choir singing in here! She was yelling to her friend because she was surrounded by work out machines that make noise. I don't know, maybe the noise should be a sign that you shouldn't be talking on your fucking phone? Since you're also supposedly exercising?...

It's a real phobia, people, don't laugh with your perfectly white and flossed teeth. Lots and lots of Web sites dedicate themselves to helping people overcome dental phobia, but the problem is that they are all implicitly trying to get you to VISIT the dentist. I used to work at Northwestern University Dental School as a slave to 2 of the Deans there before they closed the school to spend money on something like football. The dental students were, on the whole, very nice and smart. For practice, they worked on indigent patients who had no health insurance and could not afford dental care on their own. Here is a horror story about a patient. If you suffer from dentaphobiaousness, do not read on. Students did routine cleaning as well as more involved techniques like extractions and root canals. They were assigned certain stations to work in, sort of like cubicles with their own machines and equipment. One of the students forgot to clean the machine between appointments and when h...

C. Thomas Howell ("Ponyboy" in the film version of the SE Hinton classic, The Outsiders. I remember how profound I thought it was to write "Stay gold" in someone's middle school yearbook) made half of a cameo appearance in E.R. last night, playing a kidnapping pedophile whose three lines were, "Ergh!" "Where is she?" and "Let go!" What happened, C. Thomas Howell? Remember how much promise you had Soul Man, the overly racist (but totally typical of 80s) movie illustrating the backlash of affirmative action wherein your character wore blackface to be admitted into college? I always confuse him with Timothy Hutton, though I like TH much better and wanted to marry him after seeing Beautiful Girls. I just looked TH up on imdb and he's in pre and post production for about 5 movies, so that's a good sign. Anyway, E.R. has become this field of Where Are They Nows? Last night's episode alone featured John Stamos, John Leguizamo, ...

I swear to you that I do not watch the show Trading Spouses on any kind of regular basis, but I happened upon it last night at a quarter to ten and it was either that or Veronica Mars , which I actually do like a lot. However, the short bit I saw of the show was so horrific that I was hooked in immediately. Reality shows are the car crashes of pop culture. This really, really, super fat woman with a gigantic gap in her teeth was crying to another woman about how she was worried about her family and all. Turns out the big woman, Marguerite, a devout Christian/Psychotic had switched with a family who believed in astrology and the summer solstice and liked stars and didn't read the Bible. In other words, they were the spawns of hell sent to destroy Marguerite and her family (except she never said "family;" it always came out as "fambly"). On the drive back to her home, M. was crying and sobbing, working herself up, saying things like, "I never knew I'd se...

I swear to God the second that the clock struck midnight on Halloween, holiday commercials started appearing on TV, department stores threw up holly and blinking lights, and the grocery store stocked the shelves with egg nog. Never too early to spend, spend, spend. ( Pic 1 ): Tabby as a Hugh Hefner bunny. ( Pic 2 ): My good friends Liz and Luke after our Halloween party when everyone had gone home. Here are a two f-ed up things as of late: (1). Our local newscast on Monday spent 15 minutes of a 30 minute broadcast feeding on the Terrell Owens dismissal. For those on you who aren't from Philadelphia or obsessed with dumb shit like pro football, TO was a receiver for the Eagles who was recently suspended and then asked to leave, I think b/c he insulted someone else . It's all over the news here while 25 seconds were given to a kid in Philly who was accidentally shot and killed by his friend's dad's handgun. Less than that amount of time was given to the riots in Argentin...

Am home sick today (a double entendre. "Home sick" as in not feeling well and "home sick" as in missing Mexico). Should've known this would happen after the go-go-go vacation we had along with the long travel day on Sunday and waking up early and out of sorts yesterday. I hate coming back from vacation especially when I nkow that I won't have more time off for a long while. The cats and I are planning a fabulous day together of shedding, meowing at the ceiling for no apparent reason, and sitting in the houseplant. At some point, I need to eat something, but it will have to be something made out of sour cream & onion potato chips, wheat bread, pickles, and over-ripe tomatoes b/c we don't have anything else in the fridge. What else about our trip? Neither one of us own a watch and so we never exactly knew what time it was. Didn't use my cell phone except maybe twice to check the time. Spoke to most people in Spanish, including the whitey-whi...

We have returned from our ten day excursion to Mexico, not that much the worse for wear, a little tanner, a little more fluent in Spanish, a lot more respect for the country, its citizens, and the landscape itself is often breathtakingly beautiful. Two animal observations: (1). In the more rural areas, you will often stumble upon donkeys/burros standing alone on a long stretch of otherwise uncultivated land, munching grass and braying, seeming to belong to no one. Shawn wondered aloud if the donkeys are public property. Like, no one official owns them, but if you need one, you just hop on, kick, and go. I counter guessed that they do belong to individual family's, but that they're maybe not that easy to track. So, one title for our trip is, Where's my Donkey? (2). The competing title for our trip is "Dog Teats for Everyone," because every single female dog we saw in the wild had teats for their puppies (Don't worry about eating chickens or hogs or cattle from ...