“Well, your guys are running a dungeon!”
“But it’s a very tax-positive dungeon!”
Physical Update Number 301
The Flyaway Retina
BY CONTRAST to Charlie’s bronze Obama mystery plan, through my job at a UC, my girls and I have amazing insurance. Sally’s vision care alone includes eye exams, dilations, new lenses.
It’s almost too good.
Because while this gloomy ponytailed hipster is fitting Sally’s fancy new frames, he looks up at me.
“What glasses are you wearing?”
“Uh, just some Costco reading glasses,” I say, startled. “When I drive, for distance, I just . . . look over the top. I Chuck Schumer-it.”
“You need to get an exact prescription,” Lemony Snicket says. “You’re going to destroy your eyes.”
Oh no. Yet another physical ailment.
However, having learned my lesson with the dentist (I now brush and floss re-li-gious-ly), I decide to join Charlie on a trip to Peterson Optical. He has a coupon. Peterson Optical is less a medical establishment than a showcase for designer frames.
“These cat-eye ones are cute,” I say—but my browsing is cut off.
A hearty, cheerful Caucasian man in a white lab coat greets Charlie, leading him off to his exam.
A willowy young Asian woman in a green lab coat comes for me. I immediately take my internal “middle-aged monologue” aloud: “I am a nervous patient. It has been so long since I’ve had an eye exam I don’t even understand the new equipment. I may scream or jump out of a window. A lot.”
Dr. Sung doesn’t say anything. Her expression is opaque.
I have to sit down, look through a lens, and stare at a hot air balloon. Next, I move to another machine and then she does a poof of air that checks for glaucoma. It is a comical test that seems quite unreal to me.
I move anxiously to a chair with a big metal helmet—but this part is actually pleasurable. There’s a soothing clicking sound as Dr. Sung dials lenses in and out. There’s the pleasure of suddenly seeing clearly and sharply.
That’s something I didn’t have when young. Everything was clear. Now that we’re older, farsightedness is actually a blessing. When I dine out with Charlie, his face is softened, photoshopped, nicely lit. I put on my glasses to scan the menu, look up, and startle. “Whoa, honey! So many pores!”
Not seeing well is also a great Botox deterrent. Instead of worrying about my wrinkles, I just get Target glasses .5 lower than my true prescription.
Dr. Sung does a “follow-the-pen” test, shines a light deep into my eyes. . . . But of course, now she wants to kick it up a notch.
“I can dilate your eye, or you can do an OptiScan. No dilation, they just take a picture. Sound good?”
“Sure!” I say.
But the room she leads me to smells like ammonia.
Now I have to grope this Aliens Part 2 exoskeleton and press my eye on it. There’s a blue flash.
The door blows open. For the first time, Dr. Sung is excited. “Shall we look at your optic nerve?” she asks.
Do I have a choice?
We look. Oh God. The optic nerve looks frightening. It’s Frankenstein green, shot through with neon red veins, and has big black spots in the middle. The macula.
“Everything looks fine,” she says, “except—what’s this?” Click click click.
Dr. Sung studies my optic nerve alertly and intently.
“See this? It looks like a tiny string? It could be part of the normal fabric of the eye, or it could be a very small tear. Do you see stars or floaters?”
“No,” I insist, immediately seeing both stars and floaters.
I feel defeated. I walked in feeling totally fine. I took an optional test Charlie didn’t even take. Now I can worry about a torn-to-ribbons retina.
“Look,” I say to Charlie, “in Uganda like in the seventeenth century, what did people do without OptiScan? I’ve never heard of any epidemics of detached retinas.”
“Actually my friend Hugh had one. Said it was quite painful.”
I complain to Marilyn on the phone: “Come on. It’s not like retinas fly off—”
“Oh Barry had that,” she says airily, “when we were in Cambria.”
“Okay!” I say. “I guess in middle age there is an epidemic of detached retinas. Our retinas are just flying off, as we whiz down the 405.”
“We were just looking inside Barry’s colon,” she says tenderly.
“What?”
“Oh yes, Dr. Achebe showed us the movie of his colonoscopy. We thought it would be hideous, but no: Barry’s colon looked peaceful, serene, like floating down the Grand Canyon. When are you getting yours? Aren’t you overdue?”
“I can’t face it right now!”
Although, as Kaitlin says, “After dealing with Papa’s and Helen’s health and MediCal, my colonoscopy was the high point of my week.”
Gah!
The March for Science
ANDIE IS Facebook-messaging me:
Are you in? I haven’t heard from you!
What: The March for Science!
When: Saturday, April 20th, Earth Day!
Why: Climate Change Awareness!
Green Energy! Sustainable Living!
How: (A photo of Andie in a Pussy Hat, pink safety goggles, and pink lab coat)
OH JOY, another march, in this brave new era when we’re marching all the time. Let me go on record to say I’m totally happy to have done the Women’s March a few months earlier. It was quite the novel—and fulfilling—experience.
Yes, in response to that election, initially, we had all been in trauma: the despair, the hysterical Facebook meme-posting, the lying in the bathtub in full black concert dress with a bottle of Costco tequila, listening to all the late-night NPR news shows and wailing.
But ever resourceful, a wildflower growing out of ashes, Andie was the one who spearheaded a positive energy transformation. She printed out patterns, bought wool, and helped us all knit our own pussy hats. (Quite a feat, as I cannot knit, I am farsighted, and am actually visually dyslexic—to me it was like skiing, and my hat only had one real “ear,” but no matter!) Andie got us all psyched about the midterm elections. (This was a term we’d never thought about, and the new math was exciting: “In the eleventh and fourteenth districts, if we can just ‘flip’ them by getting a 59 percent majority in both houses of—”)
And now, instead of passively checking the news alerts continually chiming on our iPhones, we were going to hit the streets! We were going to hand-make our own signs! We were going to be marching!
There was such excitement about it, a newness.
Typically we would have grabbed some Starbucks and driven our momwagons over to the march. But according to giddy group text threads lead by Andie, the proper way to get to a march is by this new thing in L.A. called public transportation! In particular, what was it called again? The Metro!
Of course, when my group of four—Hannah, Sally, Charlie, and myself—arrived at the Pasadena “Metro” station, reality began to dawn. Before us was a sea of hundreds of women, in pussy hats, with hand-lettered signs, and plenty of fire, joyously waiting . . . to never, ever get to the march. “Tickets—do we have to buy tickets to ride the Metro?” one woman in a Michelle Obama shirt was excitedly asking. Clearly, few of us had ever taken the Metro. Eventually, slowly, almost apologetically, a train pulled into the station. Compared to the massive crowd it was like a toy Disneyland Dumbo train. It seated— what?—twenty? And we could almost hear it cringe—“Ow”—as six women crammed themselves on.
What sort of medical cannabis were people smoking when they dreamed up this charmingly antiquated scheme? How about canoes? Up the L.A. River? Women unite! Here’s your pink wooden paddle thingee!
Realizing that, via the Metro, it would take us ’til Thursday to go twelve miles, the four of us hopped into an insanely surge-priced Uber. Ninety-five dollars later, we joined other jubilant women’s marchers
, walking shoulder to shoulder, all chanting, drumming, and bearing festive signs as far as the eye could see, the throng so thick you couldn’t actually move—
When all at once I remembered I am claustrophobic. I have panic attacks if I sit in the middle seat of an airplane. My mind immediately conjured the movie Inception, where the buildings all curve into collapse, and an ensuing sudden stampede, all of our bodies under a pile of pussy hats, with dented wool ears, pink pom-poms rolling.
I informed my household I had to get out of this human mosh pit immediately, and started pushing my way backward through the crowd.
“Are you leaving us, mom?” asked Sally, in disbelief.
Me. The “liberated” mom who was literally abandoning her daughters at a women’s march. “Oh, don’t worry, honey,” I babbled. “You’ll be fine. Look at the quality of these fine feminist people. You’ll probably find yourself a better mom, maybe one who remembered to bring Trader Joe’s snacks or Pirate Booty or bottled water. Enjoy the parade!” I concluded, forgetting that it actually was a march. And we didn’t know where it was headed. And we had no car.
Finally finding a bit of daylight on Grand Street, I dropped onto a bus bench and let out a deep breath. Whew! Mind calming. Pulse slowing. At which point, the next menopausal, middle-aged lady crow came to roost. Too much coffee by 10:30 a.m.! Where was the ladies’ room? This was like prewar Czechoslovakia!
Across the street, amazingly, was the Hilton Checkers Hotel, letting marchers inside. I wobbled in. On the second floor, an impassable line of pink hats snaked out the ladies’ door. Just one guy came out of the mens’. A woman asked, timidly: “Oh, do you mind if we go in?”
“It’s a women’s march!” a stout woman dressed as a horned uterus (you had to be there) exclaimed. “Of course we should invade the men’s restroom!” So we did—but, of course, argh! The two equally middle-aged sisters ahead of me took so long in their stalls they could have been drafting new bipartisan voting legislation.
A full hour later, after being spotty at best, cell phone reception finally popped back on (so many people were taking selfies it had crashed the network). I finally found my group again, under a papier-mâché statue of a naked Putin showering with our naked president. By then, I had already mentally made a list of things needed for our next women’s march, including Xanax, short-wave radios, and perhaps specially lined pussy hats that could be used as adult diapers. A whole new twist on the saying “Our bodies, ourselves.”
ALL OF WHICH is to say now, it’s a few months later, the novelty is over, and my world has shifted again. And there is another march on the horizon.
I sigh. Pick up the phone, call Andie.
“You know what?” I say. “As much as I support Earth Day and the Science March and the planet, I don’t think I can march.”
“What?” she says incredulously.
“I’m incredibly concerned about climate change, but I have some even more immediate life problems here,” I say. “Charlie owes money he doesn’t have related to Obamacare, which has been its own tortuous road. I’ve got Hannah calling me crying with some kind of mystery skin ailment. When what she should be crying about is her grades. Sally—”
“We’ve got to keep the momentum going,” Andie says. “We’ve got to keep showing up. Remember? The midterms are coming. We have to flip both houses—” She goes into the math . . .
My tea dings in the microwave. When I get back on the phone, Andie is continuing . . . “Girls and science— They need female role models— Lego is now making pink blocks— To inspire girls to compete in robotics competitions— Because hands-on STEM learning—”
“Sure, sure,” I say to Andie, who, let’s be honest, is a graphic designer, not a scientist. “We’ve all seen that TED Talk about children’s creativity by that British guy who was also knighted. We’re all enamored of memories of our kids’ idyllic elementary schools—the classroom volcanos exploding with baking soda, wonders of milk carton pea plants, sunny farms of ladybugs—”
“It’s hands on! Hands on!”
“Well, Sally just did a science fair project that, I’m sorry, was the worst in seventh grade. She literally wrote, ‘There’s an episode of Hey Arnold! where they tried to grow a potato out of a potato—’ You understand? All around her, kids are designing robots and water filtration and solar panels and she’s trying to grow a potato out of a potato.”
“If she’s really curious, that’s what she should do.”
“No, Andie. Science is not just a happy feeling inside. Eventually, inexorably, comes The Ugly. The multiplication tables, long division, algebra, trig, then calculus, if a career in science is really being pursued. Them’s the rules, and they’re tougher than ever. Take my nephew Sam—4.0 and shut out of every college he applied to—Stanford, UCLA, UC Berkeley, even UC San Diego! Forget the Mentos volcanos and hands-on STEM, I see online that if you have a perfect SAT and a 4.5 GPA, you have a 15 percent chance—that’s one five—of getting into UCLA.”
“Really?” Andie’s truly surprised.
“Turns out, the competition is not just kids who start as early as sixth grade, practicing their PSATs and planning out their high school AP courses. A professor friend of mine at UCLA—she’s Asian, so she gets to say it—she says international students from wealthy families in Mainland China are gaming the system! They use fake Beijing High School transcripts, ‘gun runners’ who take their SATs for them—they morph their ID photos together via computer. They arrive at a UC and don’t actually speak English. One student will show up to class with twenty clickers—”
“What are those?”
“These remotes you click to input your answers, via Wi-Fi, when a teacher gives an in-class test. It’s for class sizes in the hundreds. So one kid represents twenty, who are at the beach. They literally park their Maseratis in faculty spaces. But they can afford the one hundred dollars a pop for the parking tickets, and the UC makes money, because foreign students pay three times the tuition!”
“Well, as we all know, some wealthy white families do that, too—but at least they don’t have to pay three times the tuition. So I guess there’s a kind of discrimination even . . . ? Unh . . . hm.”
“Although Hannah does tend to do well on standardized tests,” I say worriedly. “That could be the saving grace.”
We end up agreeing that, while I will stay home with Hannah, who’s sick, I will watch Andie and Company’s stream on Facebook.
I have to admit, as the morning unfolds, the signs, as usual, are funny.
IF YOU’RE NOT THE SOLUTION, YOU’RE THE PRECIPITATE!
PROTEST COSINE, PROTEST SINE.
WHAT DO WE WANT? EVIDENCE-BASED RESEARCH! WHEN DO WE WANT IT? AFTER PEER REVIEW!
MITOSIS, NOT DIVISION.
SUPPORT LABS. That was on a dog’s back.
And then there were speeches, fewer from scientists than from YouTube science explainers. For me, at least, there were many dubious or perhaps arguable lines that got huge applause:
“Science is inherently political!”
“Science is objective, but it is not neutral!”
And then the New Age chants began: “Science is hope!” “Science is our planet!” “Peace, love, science!”
I heard myself grousing to my daughter: “Sure. It’s like ‘Nature.’ To some, ‘Nature’ is a beautiful flower. But ‘Nature’ is also Stage 5 hurricanes and poison frogs that eat their own offspring. And—and pitcher plants.”
The chants continue: “Health is science! Safety is science! Clean water is science!”
I yell at the TV: “PS: Nuclear missiles from North Korea? SCIENCE!”
Overall?
I am bad at marches.
I am bad at revolution.
FlabbraMom
IT’S SALLY’S twelfth birthday.
It couldn’t come at a worse time. I’m becoming increasingly concerned about her.
At fifteen, Hannah has a million friends—perhaps too many. She’s always flo
uncing around with her motley squad—tripping down the auditorium steps, bent double at one another’s jokes, waving my car away. “We’re all going to get Boba!”
By contrast, introverted Sally spends a lot of time in her room. Though she’s not exactly alone. She’s online chatting on “Pesterchum,” a teen “fandom” based on the eight-thousand-page online web comic Homestuck, while her phone constantly buzzes. She picks it up, types, puts it down. A moment later, it buzzes again. Repeat cycle.
It’s just a continually buzzing phone. A little phone pet. “Who are you texting?” I ask.
“Oh,” she says, “that’s JJ. He was going to commit suicide due to a breakup, went online one last time, found me, I made him laugh! He’s wonderful.”
DRIVING HOME one afternoon, Sally seems unusually quiet. Worried. “What’s wrong?” I ask.
“I can’t tell you.”
“Tell me.”
What spools out is the next level of messy detail. JJ is a fifteen-year-old gay boy in Tampa, Florida, who mostly lives with his aunts. But sometimes he has to go stay at his uncle’s, a restaurant manager and an alcoholic who doesn’t like gay people. JJ has locked himself in the closet because his uncle is going to hit him.
I am aghast.
“Can he dial 911?”
“No, he says that will make it even worse.”
I’m trying to imagine how dialing 911 would make it worse. The police could at least pull you out of the closet—
“What’s his uncle’s address?”
“I don’t know. He won’t say.”
Completely stumped as to what to do, and upset, I construct a fake badass mom in my mind and I try to impersonate her.
“Sally: you know that if we knew his address and he asked us for help, I WOULD GET ON A PLANE TODAY. I would chopper in and we would get him. But if he doesn’t give us any info, we can’t.”
She seems comforted at the notion that I would chopper in. That seems to staunch the flow, for the moment. The choppering.
The Madwoman and the Roomba Page 9
