Eclipse…

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Well, if you’re reading this, someone must have survived the “great American eclipse” this afternoon… or the internet is being read by alien archeologists 1000s of years in the future after they have figured out how to recover old network drives. Either way.

Yes, it’s eclipse day in America, which means some non-zero percentage of the population is absolutely losing their shit. It’s totally understandable who the ancients were deeply suspect of sudden darkness in the middle of the day. Why, deeply into the 21st century, it’s more than an interesting aside and fascinating bit of astro-physical trivia. I mean we know what’s happening, we know when it’s happening, and we can project how often and where these events will occur indefinitely into the future. 

We the people have once again made the predictable mistake of thinking that we’re somehow unique and that this is a world-changing once off event. I suppose it makes for good ratings. It must do, given how much ink and airtime have been spent delivering minute by minute coverage to Mr. and Mrs. America and all the ships at sea.

Look, it’s great. It’s a fascinating experience. I went outside and looked around during “peak darkness.” Unlike a certain ex-president during the eclipse in 2017, I managed to avoid looking directly at the sun today, so I’ve got that going for me if nothing else. But now that the next big local eclipse is 20-something years in the future, I’m forced to wonder what perfectly normal and explicable event will be next to have itself turned into a media circus. I’ll never quite understand how we pick the things we want to blow out of proportion or carry to entirely illogical extremes.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Stalled. My quest for more weight loss has been stalled for almost two weeks. I haven’t made any changes from what has worked consistently for the last nine months, but I’ve spent the last 14 days losing and gaining the same pound and a half. I’m trying to be a good sport and going after the 200-pound goal the docs seem to want me to hit… But I’m already sitting at an 1800 calorie a day hard limit and frankly I like eating too much to go restricting that much further. I should also note that I’m prepared to garrote the first person who chimes in and says “you just need to exercise more.” Bugger directly off.

2. New computer day. Wednesday was new computer day at the office. Under most circumstances I’d say that was great. Except the new computer they’ve decided on is a desktop that will live permanently at the office while we take out laptops to live permanently at home. Instead of two work computers it means I now am signed for three separate pieces of equipment. It also means that in order to work between home and the office, I’ll be relying on “the cloud” properly being able to host two decades worth of work product instead of it living on my local drive and simply being backed up to the cloud. I’m not a fan of this for a lot of reasons. Color me curious to see what the response is going to be when our elderly laptops start dying off and someone has to be on the hook for machines that live at home being out of sight and out of mind.

3. Some weeks are busier than others. This one has felt like every time I knock something off my list of things to do, two or three more rise up to take its place. It hasn’t been debilitating, but it has certainly been obnoxious as this trend managed to cross all lines between work and home. It’s the first April in a very long time that hasn’t been entirely consumed by working as an advanced party and event planner. It seems that finally having chucked that one large thing over the side, maybe it’s just a natural effect that 57 small things have come along to eat up that white space on my calendar. 

The post in which I don’t bitch about health insurance…

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I know the hip thing to do is bitch about health insurance and the American medical system on social media. There seems to be an entire cottage industry dedicated to telling us how awful everything this. My experience over the last year has been the polar opposite of the narrative I’ve seen being pushed across the internet. 

About a month ago, I got a notice that BlueCross didn’t want to pay for my 30-day heart monitor. Frankly, with the $10,000 bill associated with it, I didn’t exactly want to pay it either. But, as it was “not medically necessary,” according to their note, they weren’t going to pay. That’s despite two cardiologists deciding that that level of monitoring was, in fact, medically necessary. 

After several long conversation with me – and presumably even longer discussions with people representing the hospital system and the test provider, it looks like BlueCross ended up paying out about $3,000 as the “insurance rate.” I just paid $36 as my portion, and everyone now appears to be satisfied that they’ve done their due diligence and has gotten a fair shake. 

I honestly was expecting more of a fist fight on that. Who really knows? It may yet come back to rear its ugly head, but for now I’m considering it a win.

Look, I’ve learned a lot about health insurance in the last year. It’s not an ideal system. It requires you to keep a very close eye on your treatment plan and everyone involved in it. Even more so, it means staying on top of your insurance provider, knowing their terms of service and the ins and outs of your policy, and questioning everything that doesn’t pass the common sense test. That’s just the baseline starting point to participate in the system. I don’t know that it would be any less complex under single payer. Under any universe of care, I expect that I would want to be very aware of what was happening and the services that were being provided on my behalf. 

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Water. The guidance from the medicos is to drink water and then when I think I’ve had enough water to go and have some more. That’s fine. Wonderful. But honestly, if you want me to drink 647 cups of water a day, water should actually have some kind of flavor. I never had any problem drinking copious amounts of tea, or coffee, or gin, but the common factor there was that all three of those things tasted like something instead of just existing as being wet and “good for you.” The amount of things I’ve spent the last nine months doing on the ephemeral promise that it’s good for me yet with no other obvious tangible benefit is honestly just a little bit horrifying.

2. Better living through chemistry. I’m still adjusting to the most recent medication changes. It seems that this round is all about reminding me of the virtue of incremental change, as each day I seem to feel every so slightly better than the day before. The first day or so of the change was downright insufferable and now we’ve moved on to somewhere between annoying and obnoxious. The head fog and general feeling of disaffection is absolutely real. I’m trying to go along and remember that it can take a month or more to really adjust, but frankly sometimes that month really just sucks and it feels marginally better to say it out loud for an audience.

3. All you can eat. I grew up in what I’ll always consider the golden age of all you can eat dining. Within a dozen miles from home we had a Western Sizzlin, a Western Steer, wings at every local fire department on various nights of the week, a Pizza Hut lunch buffet, and a whole damned salad bar at Wendy’s. There were buffets everywhere. I don’t remember them being particularly food safe but I remember them being tasty. I had a dream about a fictitious all you can eat joint that never was – a big neighborhood bar and grill that pulled out all the stops with everything from burritos the size of your head to every carving station imaginable. It was a happy dream… but as it turns out. I’m a little sad that my days of drinking there in this bar of my imagination are over (perhaps temporarily), but that my days of all you can eat are in all likelihood dead and gone forever.

Echo chamber…

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Turn on the news and it’s impossible to miss the steady drumbeat of stories about Trump, or Biden, or the health of The King and Princess of Wales depending on which side of the Atlantic your news provider of choice is based. Throw in a sprinkle of Russia, China, Iran, Hamas, and a few unavoidable human interest stories and the whole thing becomes an echo chamber. It doesn’t particularly matter if you’re getting your stories from cable news, the internet, or what passes for newspapers. The mashup is more or less the same, just with a slightly different agenda being pushed.

That’s fine. The news is a business just like any other. Without eyes on screens or pages, there is no news. Like it or not, whether it’s “good for us” or not, the more confrontational the headlines, the more eyes will end up on it. Outlets are doing whatever they have to do to compete. 

This weekend, though, I found myself doing what I do more and more often. I opted out. Sure, I scanned the headlines in the morning, but after that, I shifted over to music or podcasts, or parked my television on a couple of channels that were either running old movies or old TV shows and that didn’t have any interested in trying to sell me the news of the day. Honestly it made for some terrific background noise. I highly recommend it.

I’m not sure if it’s something about getting older in general or about my response to the annoyance of modernity in particular, but my god is it getting hard to give a shit about anything other than the five or six “Big Things” I’m already interested in. Beyond that, most everything is beginning to resemble a wacky waving inflatable arm flailing tube man vying for attention.

I seem to revisit this topic a lot. Every time it feels like it’s becoming more and more imperative. I’d love to know whether that says more about me or about the world. Maybe both. 

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. The limits of better living through chemistry. My doctors and I like to play a fun game. The goal of this game is to wait until I am just about feeling normal and then decide it’s time to add, take away, or otherwise screw around with one or more of the medications I’m taking. The whole thing seems purposely designed to leave me feeling vaguely disoriented, tired, out or sorts, and anxious as often as possible. As we are closing in on a year of this abject medical fuckery, I’d hoped we were a bit closer to reaching some kind of steady state with all this. So far, however, that doesn’t seem to be the case.

2. Eternal cold. I’m approximately 2/3’s the man I used to be. Apparently all of that represents lost insulation and I am, therefore, always uncomfortably cold. I’m forever wandering around the house putting on additional layers. I have extra fuzzy coats at the office. I have four layers of blankets on my bed. Every seat in the living room has at least one blanket… and I generally use multiple while watching TV in the evening. File this as yet another problem that I foolishly assumed would somehow be resolved by now. It’s very strange not having any idea what was the last time that I really felt warm. I didn’t realize it was something I was taking for granted.

3. Streaming television. The number of people who look at me like I have 16 heads when I tell them I still subscribe to old fashioned cable television is pretty astronomical. I get everything from stunned disbelief to pitches for satellite, antenna, and every streaming platform under the sun. The truth is, aside from cost, I’m basically satisfied with cable. There’s one “box” to deal with and every program it supplies is available with the push of one or two buttons. My user experience with streaming services has rarely been so seamless. Whether it’s updating passwords, constantly switching between apps hunting for the generic “something to watch,” or some episodes of a series being available on one service while other episodes are on another, or the sheer cost of building out an array of stream services to match the programming natively available through cable. Most of my television “watching” is in fact, listening to television in the background while I do other things. Cable excels at performing this function. It simply doesn’t require any thought at all as something is always on when you push the power button. Sure, I’ll keep rotating through the myriad of streaming options as I slowly consume their “prestige television” contenders, but I don’t see any world where I’m happy with seven or eight streamers attempting to replace or replicate the proper channel surfing experience. I’m sure streaming is a brave new world for others, but for the foreseeable future, I don’t see it being much more than an add on for me.

Revising the plan…

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More than a decade ago I finally got around to asking a lawyer to officially draw up a will and do some end of life planning. Having something on file in the event of “what if” felt like the prudent thing to do in my 30s.  Honestly, I packaged it off to the county courthouse and then pretty much didn’t think of it at all for almost 11 years. 

I’ve learned a lot about myself in the intervening years. More specifically, bouncing around between hospitals and specialists since last summer has absolutely focused my mind a bit about what I’d want to happen should things go sideways in a hurry. No one seems to think I’m on the threshold of keeling over, but I am on the precipice of falling over into the back half of my 40s. Dusting things off and giving it all an update felt, once again, like the prudent course of action.

I don’t think anyone ever really enjoys peering through the glass at their own mortality. Going through the bits and bobs certainly wasn’t a laugh riot, but I feel better for having started the process. There is, if nothing else, some small comfort in having the ability to have your intentions known even when you can no longer speak for yourself.

I assume it’ll take a little bit of time for the legal eagles to get things caught up, but overall I feel like I’ve done a good thing. If nothing else, may it was a good way to start drawing a line under my year of medical fuckery and getting on with things. 

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. The diminishing list of things I care about. The older I get, the fewer things I seem to give a shit about. As a kid, I guess we all want to be popular. I’ve long since given that up. I used to care about politics. Now? Yeah, the more these greybeards talk, the less I listen. I used to love to travel. Today? Shit. I can’t be bothered to drive across town. The number of things I legitimately care about can probably be listed on one hand – and some days I wouldn’t even need all the fingers. It seems all I really want now is quiet and as little fuss about anything as possible. I’m not sure that’s necessarily a bad thing, but occasionally it feels like I should want to be more engaged. Fortunately, those feelings don’t usually last very long.

2. Medical science. We like to think we’re so advanced. I mean it’s great that we’ve surpassed herbs and leeches, but for the better part of the last year, the answer to a lot of my medical questions has been “well, we can’t replicate what you experienced and the tests we’ve given you are inconclusive, so keep doing what you’re doing and see me again in six months.” Look, I’m thrilled that there isn’t some kind of flashing neon warning sign popping off after whatever tests they’re doing, but in my more anxiety filled moments, it’s hard not to feel a little bit like a ticking time bomb.

3. Congress and technology. If there’s anything more useless than a bunch of geriatrics “carefully crafting” legislation about how current and future technology should be used, I have a hard time thinking of what it might be. Ask the average Representative to sign in to TikTok, or any other app of your choice, and I’m quite sure there’s a better than average chance you’ll get a blank stare. I’m not out here saying social media giants are innocent victims here, but I have deep reservations about issues surrounding the future of technology in America being decided by a group whose average age is approaching sixty and who have not demonstrated any particularly deep understanding of the actual issues involved. Then again, I don’t suppose we can really expect Congress to apply any academic rigor to this when they don’t do likewise with any other substantive policy issues.

Failure and recovery…

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I was raised in the age of the personal computer. Not long after the first Apple Macintosh ended up in my elementary school’s “computer lab,” one landed on our desk at home. Still, though, I don’t necessarily consider myself a “digital native.” For the most part, my computers have always simply been productivity tools that more or less live on my desk. I don’t generally ask them to do anything extraordinary or heroic – a bit of word processing, web browsing, and video streaming. 

I also have a bit of a habit of keeping my computers just a bit too long. Unlike my phone, as long as the computer is puttering along, I’m mostly satisfied to let it keep going even at a slowed pace. In 30+ years of computer ownership, that’s always been good enough.

Good enough always is right up to the point where it isn’t… which is apparently the point I reached with my 10-year-old iMac last Thursday afternoon. Sometime between when I signed out of work for the day at 4:00 and when I sat down and tried to stream an episode of Game of Thrones while I had dinner at 5:00 (don’t judge me), I suffered what I’ve taken to calling a “catastrophic hard drive failure.” 

If you haven’t lost a hard drive unexpectedly, I don’t recommend it. I’ve spent the last three days slowly putting my electronic life back together. Needing to unexpectedly buy a new computer, of course, just adds insult to injury.

For the last five or six years, I’ve been paying a nominal monthly fee to have my computer backed up “in the cloud.” That has honestly been the saving grace of this experience once I remembered that I actually hadn’t lost decades of photos, writing, finances, and every other kind of file and record you can imagine. Once I got past the initial terror at the possibility of losing everything, getting it all back was just a matter of following all the steps – and downloading a lot of software. 

I’m not absolutely thrilled with my new 24-inch iMac. Stepping down from the 27-inch model feels, in some ways, like a downgrade. It’s a fine machine and I still like the all-in-one form factor, but I’m really missing the extra screen real estate. I won’t rule out needing to add a second monitor at some point to compensate for that. For now, I’m trying to be satisfied with having brough things back to life in fairly short order and without too much trouble. 

For my next trick, I’ll be ordering a new external hard drive so I can start keeping an onsite back up of everything. For most situations that should be more convenient and really cut down the amount of time it takes to recover… but you can bet I’ll keep paying that monthly fee for online backup. It proved to be some of the best money I’ve ever spent on a subscription. 

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Summer clothes. It was warm over the weekend and I thought it was probably a good chance to go through some of my summer garb to see what still fits. Surely, I thought to myself, among my stack of tee shirts and shorts I’d find more than enough to get me through the hot weather. Yeah, no. Out of twelve pairs of shorts, there are two I can probably wear… if I keep my belt cinched really tight. Tee shirts were a bit of a better result, but not by much… as long as you don’t mind that oversized and baggy look. This means I’m being forced against a wall where I can’t avoid more goddamned shopping. Of all the things I’m loath to spend money one, clothes ranks not far off the top of the list. I need to find someone in Cecil County who offers personal shopping and stylist services, because I’d like to participate in this process as little as possible.

2. Rematch. Barring the unforeseen it appears that a rematch between Joe Biden and Donald Trump is inevitable. Every four years I say it, and every four years I mean it… I can’t imagine being less inspired to vote for a candidate than I am by the prospect of one of these two geriatrics running the country for the next four years. If, in the country of 300 million people, these are the best our nation has to offer, honest to god we should just pack up and call it a day. We’re not so much a country as a circus protected by a large standing army.

3. SoTU. This week will mark Joe Biden’s 3rd State of the Union Address. That’s pretty good for a guy who according to wackjob right wingers isn’t technically President of the United States. There was a time I’d have laid in the chips and dip and treated the State of the Union as an alternate reality Super Bowl. Sitting here now, though, I know there’s not a chance in hell I’m going to make any special effort to watch. The simple fact is, I can’t think of anything I’m interested in hearing Joe Biden say… and I’m even less eager to poison my ears with whatever treason-scented fuckery spews out of the Republican response.