Exhausted Blah Blah Blah

I Give

Remember how I said my doctor told me to go to a urologist? (You do? Oh man, you need to get a life.)

When I woke up at 1 am with an urgent need to go potty, when I peed ground glass, I said to myself, girl, you have got to listen to that man. Two in a month? Something ain't right.

So next week, I get to go sit in a creepy waiting room full of guys who can't get it up, can't pee, talk about their prostate, and probably do a good deal of self-adjustment even in the waiting room. Eww.

And now that I've made the appointment, I wonder - well, what are they going to do to me? Does this involve tubes? Of any sort? I don't want tubes. No tubes. Sheesh.

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Brought to You in Amazing LoserVision!

Along with books we sometimes get at Unnamed Co., we sometimes get videos. These contain amazing videos like "The Lifecycle of the Three-Segmented Flatworm". Last week, there were a lot of videos on the table, free to any taker. I brought home two bags full. So far, I have watched "Kenny", which is about a guy with Lamellar Icthysosis, which I honestly was interested in.

Then I watched "Common Ground", about a family, ten in all, living in Mumbai in a 'house' the size of my living room. It was interesting seeing how the family had maybe ten gallons of water from a common well to do everything with, but when they left the shanty, they all looked like they'd stepped out of a bandbox. I saw this in Jamaica, too, and I can't understand how they do it. That was pretty much the highlight of it. Then it showed Wife of #1 Son pouting that she didn't want to go work in the shop, selling garlands and coconuts. When #1 Son shouted, "You will go!", he grabbed her and punched the hell out of her.

#1 Daughter was working in marketing someplace. She was so proud of her job, but she was about to be married. "Amrit will want me to quit my job. I will quit. All of us here in this family, when our husbands tell us to quit our jobs, we do."

And then it ended with the shanty town being bulldozed and in its place were horrendous brick box apartment buildings, where the families could not talk to each other and work with each other or gossip about who was having an argument with whom. It showed women picking over the rubble, trying to find a wayward flip-flop or picture of their guru.

Last on this week's LoserVision list is "Parallel Lives". Okay, I completely misunderstood this when I speed-read the blurb. I thought it was about the various ways people found to get home right after 9/11 and I further thought that it talked about people who had driven cross-country together. No. It was about an indie filmmaker (Harvard grad who went on to co-direct "The Devil Wears Prada", which proves it's not what you know but who you know) who was too scared to go back to NY from California.

It took her two months to get up the balls to do it. And she decided that she would take the secondary roads and stop and talk to people.

I highly advise against this. She must have been a psycho magnet. Within five hundred miles of her starting point, she had run into one woman whose kids had been taken from her ("It wasn't me, I didn't have the drugs, he had the drugs."), one man who claimed to be orchestrating the entire US operation in Afghanistan with his thought waves, and a couple of guys who lived in the back woods eating deer jerky. There were the two IHOP busboys who said America got what it deserved. There was the Navajo guy who said, "America was built on theft and dishonesty and cruelty. It's about time they learned what it felt like." At the same time she met the Navajo guy, she met some poor Brit out in the desert photographing a very posh car. He whispered to her, "I feel a bit...um...a bit...uneasy." Hey! Me too!

She decided a father and son in Alabama who used the N word incessantly were representative of the entire south and didn't bother stopping in Georgia or Tennessee.

In West Virginia, she went to a laundromat and talked to a girl who had to have been less than 30. She was doing her laundry and her boyfriend's laundry. They were going to get married soon, despite the age difference. "I been in relationships before," she said. "Besides, I'm gonna have a baby. He's older than me. He's 61. But he don't hit me or nothing. He's a good man."

Besides this entire spectacle of sadness and loserdom, only two people in the entire film wept at the thought of 9/11. They were both Latina, probably not citizens, and the older one wept, "There is no love in our hearts. If there is no love, there can be no peace in your heart. That is how these things happen."

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Back into the land of traditionally-built women

So much for all this misery. I'm going back to Mma Ramotswe's Botswana. Where her home village, Mochudi, gets a little bigger but never changes. In the company of a woman who is wise and content and knows exactly how good she's got it. The Alexander McCall Smith "No 1 Ladies Detective Agency" series, "The Good Husband of Zebra Drive."