SPIKE//

Tuesday: 

My patient, LB, is 103 years old. She has Einsteinian hair and Beethovian hearing. She is not merely frail: she is a wisp, she is a quiet exhalation of a body. Her eyes are huge in her thin face. She’s shockingly lucid and cogent- until she isn’t. She becomes incensed and wants to know where her dinner guests are. She cannot believe how rude it is of them: you invite people to dinner, you spend all this time preparing, and they don’t even show up! I tell her I’m here, and we can have dinner together.  I hope I can devour strawberries like she can when I’m 103.

Wednesday - Friday:

A new tracheostomy patient comes into my care. Trach patients need swallowing therapy to get them off tube feeding and back on regular food. This patient is fed through a nasograstric tube, which goes up his nose, down his throat, down his esophagus and into his stomach. In the next 48 hours, he will pull out this tube a total of three times. Three times up out of his stomach, up his throat, out his nose. The entire tube. Three times. He will also pull out his trach. It appears we will begin feeding him orally sooner than we expected. 

Thursday:

I call a patient’s son. “How do you say ‘swallow’ in Farsi?”

Friday, 9 pm:

This late, it’s quiet in the nursing facility. One of my favorite patients, G, is playing UNO with some other ladies in the small dining room. She’s always perfectly and fully done up: lipstick and earrings, a shawl. All the more impressive because G can’t move the right side of her body. She puts herself together left-handed and does a smashing job. Several years ago, G had a left hemisphere stroke resulting in fluent aphasia. Her auditory comprehension is great but when she talks it’s utter gibberish. Every once in a while there’s a real word, but mostly it’s linguistic white noise. G was surprised to see me so late; I usually do therapy with her at lunch. She looks up, concerned and says in perfect prosodic nonsense, “Well you sure here are light”.

Here are some things I’d like to see this year. And if not this year, then sometime soon, I hope.

1. Compostable produce stickers and/or paper-recyclable staples;
2. Abolition of marriage as a state institution. Why does anyone care who’s marrying whom? And why does the government have any say in what a marriage is or isn’t?
3. Eradication of bedbugs. Don’t you miss sleeping on strangers’ couches?
4. Large-scale barter economies;
5. Seedless lemons. Limes don’t have seeds. Clementines don’t have seeds. What is even possibly the holdup with this technology?
6. Flat-rate BART fares;
7. Universal health care;
8. Cure for hangnails;
9. Cold fusion or Higgs bosons. I’ll settle for one or the other;
10. A lifted Honda CRX. Given where I live, it’s only a matter of time, really;
11. The sun settling down just past west Oakland as many times as possible;
12. A paycheck.

What’s on your list?

… the days are already getting longer.

In one headached night

Three dozen and a half

halfling, half-breed poems press through me-

Punctuated by whistles of runaway trains,

I’d like to tie this muse to the tracks.

By me, last night, as I was trying to fall asleep.

Phallic symbolism is everywhere. Whatever the reason, people see dicks in all kinds of unlikely places: buildings, vegetables, Disney movies. There’s even Accidental Dong, a website dedicated to in situ phallus spotting. Logically, statistically, post-sexually, shouldn’t just as many things be vagina-shaped? And yet, vaginal imagery gets way less press. There is no Accidental Vag website (though Acidental Dong has an occasional Accidental Vagina Friday feature, but even then, it’s just one day out of seven). Maybe the problem is that people aren’t quite sure what vaginas look like. This brings up a whole host of sex-ed issues which are beyond the scope of this blog. I just do words. 

One instance of people seeing vaginas instead of their penile counterparts is the case of vanilla. Vanilla is extracted from the pods of tlilxochitl orchids indigenous to Mesoamerica. The pods look like desiccated, tar-colored string beans. Really.

(Image via wikipedia)

Cortés and his conquistador thugs first encountered the pods in Mexico and brought them back to Europe in the early 1500s. The conquistadors win the non-obvious naming award: the stringy brown pods reminded them of vaginas. The word vagina comes from Latin, meaning sheath or scabbard; vanilla comes from the Spanish diminutive form of that word, meaning little vagina. How … sweet. 

I encourage you to find some appropriately inappropriate time to share this tasty morsel with your partner. 

From the lonely hearts etymology club straight to your brain, have a sunshiney day.

So you’re telling me that the phrase is “deep-seated” and not ” deep-seeded”? How could that be? “Deep-seeded” makes so much more metaphorical sense. You plant seeds deep in the ground where they are covered by dirt and time and history. In a continuing seed metaphor, deep-seeded traits can sprout up, or come to light later on. Recessive genes are deep-seeded, like red hair that skips five generations: surprise! Deep-seeded has the added bonus of sounding intentionally Freudian, alluding to wellsprings of hidden passions: your obsession for Buffy fan-fic or latent homosexuality. In contrast, what does deep-seated mean? It sounds like a transitive verb: to be deep-seated is what happens when you are swallowed bodily by a really squishy couch. 

Strangely further, I’ve had the opposite (and parallely erroneous) misinterpretation of tournament bracket seeds, which I thought were “seats”. Forgive my ignorance, dear readers, but I eschew competitive sports and the sports section in equal measure. I managed to never see the word in print until I googled it to double check just now and discovered my deep-seeded misunderstanding. In terms of brackets, “seats” are more logical than “seeds”. When two teams play, one of them is unseated from the higher-ranking position, which makes you think of a king’s throne being toppled over, which makes sense in terms of the sport-as-battle analogy. If the team were “unseeded” it sounds like they were dug up by a hungry godzilla squirrel, which is just distracting, frankly.

Previously, in misunderstandings: flawless and ruthless (part 1 and part 2)

I’m not sure that Occupy Oakland will have any lasting political ramifications. Unlike Occupy Wall Street, the Oakland movement doesn’t have a list of demands. Truthfully, I think this is for the better: leaving the Occupation open-ended has attracted a broad swath of people from the community, each bringing their own concerns, experiences and resources. 

I know I haven’t spent that much time in Oakland, but while I’ve been here, I’ve seen how segregated the city typically is: black people in the west, Mexicans in the east, Chinese in Chinatown, white people by the lake. Occupy Oakland has upended that, bringing people together from across the city. You’ve never seen heterogeneity like this. We’ve got brown people, black people, white people, Black Panthers, Gray Panthers, squat kids, Ohlone, queer people of all types, ex cons, indigenous homeless, native Oaklanders and people off the boat from every goddamn place imaginable. We’re cooking food together, washing each others’ dishes, sleeping next to one another, and seriously communicating across cultural lines. Groups that never worked together are putting bickering aside because we’re all here in the same place, in the same struggle. 

If nothing else comes out of Occupy Oakland, at least we’ll know our neighbors better. It’s possible that this will do more to break down classism and racism and power dynamics in Oakland than any single demand or protest. There’s so much respect and learning going on at Oscar Grant Plaza. To me, this is powerfully revolutionary in itself.