Rice Anxiety

I catered a rehearsal dinner tonight.  Hilarious.  That’s what it was.  Why hilarious?  Because, I have never, in any way, shape, or form, been or worked for a caterer. But, with certainty, tonight I can declare that I am, officially, a caterer.  And I liked it.

Despite the 6 days of anticipatory rice anxiety that kept me from being my best self for the last nearly-week, I enjoyed the process of catering.  Anticipatory Rice Anxiety, in case you are unfamiliar, is the anxiety one feels in response to thinking about  or talking about the  responsibility of cooking  perfect brown rice for 60  expectant wedding guests on the eve of someone’s fairy tale wedding.   After much whining, persevorating, and internet researching, I settled on making 4 large pots of rice instead of one massive vat that would be the culinary equivalent of putting all my eggs in one insecure basket.  There is the parboiling versus slow-cooking controversy. This is compounded by the measure a fixed ratio of water to rice versus the 2nd or 3rd knuckle-deep water measurement campaign.  All of this is just fancy and fun talk unless you are facing the the grave consequences of these conundrums on the eve of someone’s once in a lifetime wedding.  Caterers are like surgeons, I’ve decided.  No matter how badly someone is injured, the surgeon must calmly and definitively make a treatment plan and implement it.  Caterers don’t save lives, but they might determine whether someone’s life story hinges on that tragic wedding with horribly burned rice or, that magical wedding with the intoxicating miso sauce.

my space rewards

I had to join dreaded my space to in order to correspond with some of the high school students I work with as the school counselor.  It’s a whole universe of good and weird and inane things.  I just put my toe in the cyber pond but, in the process, I happily found my best friend from high school.  It’s like a little treasure hunt out there.

Our delightful reconnection after way too many years inspired a story about an amazing experience she had. She said she had a “Jerry Springer type story” about her recent life and offered that when I was “sitting down and not holding any hot beverages” she’d tell me about it.  Pretty irresistable, huh?  Check out my story about her story and my new regular writing gig as long as you’ve finished that steaming mug of joe.

Electability

Ossian asked me whether I thought she would like the new boy who is slated to start preschool.  “Yes,” I answered, “I think you’ll like him” after her vehement rejection of my initial “I don’t know, what do you think” answer.  “I think he’ll like me, too,” she replied.  I like that self-esteem, I thought….

Then she said, “AND, he’s really electable.”

“Did you say he’s electable?”, I inquired searching my mental archives, as I often do, for a similar sounding word she might have intended instead.

“Yes, mommy.  He’s electable,”  she asserted before returning to her vibrant collage-making.

Happy Mother’s day

I am so lucky. Two healthy kids (ok – they both have 102+ fevers right now, but HEALTHY in the biggest sense), loving and gentle partner, supportive families, cherished friends, plenty of food to eat, an ample home in a pristine natural setting, a community that is not in a war zone….. gheez. Oh yeah, and a irrevocable blog.

So, on this, my fourth mother’s day as a practicing mother, I am grateful. Countless moms are spending this day worrying about where to sleep tonight with their children, how to feed them the day’s meals, whether they can protect their little ones from a violent partner today, how to shield their kids from the random violence of war…… it’s excruciating just to imagine into.

Mothering is serious business. It’s not supposed to be convenient or painless. But it should be free of violence. For so many is it the opposite.

Might be the right day to join up or pony up with a donation to an organization that supports mothers in dangerous situations. Here are few to consider:

• Support Iraqi moms coping with war thru Codepink
• Support efforts to end domestic violence through the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence
• Support the National Coalition for the Homeless in its work to end homelessness

cut, cut, cut

California’s poor are under attack. In response to a massive and looming state budget deficit, Governor Schwarzenegger is pushing a 10% cut to the Medi-Cal program. This would mean even smaller reimbursements to health care providers serving low-income people. Most medical providers who accept Medi-Cal already absorb substantial uncompensated costs for the care they provide to the state’s most disenfranchised residents. Further cuts will certainly mean decreased access to needed medical care for the state’s 6.5 million residents covered by Medi-Cal.

Fewer and fewer health care providers accept Medi-Cal due to the already low reimbursement rates that fail to cover the costs of their services. Many of these providers are community health centers that rely on additional donations, foundation grants, and creative fundraising efforts in order to just break even and generate the revenue needed to keep their doors open to low-income patients. Reducing reimbursements for practitioners means that some, if not many, will likely close their doors to Medi-Cal patients, leaving low-income folks with even fewer options.

Reducing access to preventive and routine health care services for those already in poverty can only lead to increased costs for the state down the road as:

• Medi-Cal recipients with shrinking access turn more heavily to costly emergency room care
• Require more expensive medical care for conditions that have advanced in the dearth of more timely medical intervention
• Increasing job losses result from insufficiently treated medical conditions
• Mental illnesses without supportive treatment become mental health crises resulting in costly hospitalizations, job loss, homelessness, child neglect, and violence – all of which cost the state money to manage
• Increasing housing instability and homelessness as the burdens of unpaid medical bills push low-income people with complex medical needs out of available housing options
• Greater reliance on entitlement programs as a result of increasing poverty and decreasing employability as medi-cal recipients’ health care needs find fewer available treatment options
• Increases in substance abuse as patients tend toward harmful self-medicating options in the face of decreasing access to needed prescriptions and health care

Once again, the heroic non-profits of the private sector are left with the challenge of providing for the basic needs of this country’s economically wounded…our friends and neighbors and fellow human beings who are hurtling through the expansive holes in our disappearing safety net.

The Governator’s proposed cuts to Medi-Cal are just this moment’s crisis in what is a continuous and extensively simmering emergency: the steady abandonment of a federal commitment to provide for the social welfare of Americans whose basic needs are unmet due to violence, mental illness, medical frailty, racism, and poverty. Many of these barriers could be ameliorated by a federally guaranteed system that ensured everyone access to basics such as health care (including mental health and chemical dependency services), affordable and safe housing, supportive education, quality childcare, and human employment paying a living wage. While our system maintains pieces of of some of these structures, they are disparate, deficient, and dwindling.

Oedipus be damned

Cramming. That’s what I am doing. After a raucous week of hospitalizing our baby, I am woefully behind on my cramming schedule for CA Licensed Clinical Social Worker exam which I will be groggily taking bright and early tomorrow.

I even called today to see if I could reschedule but was mechanically told that if you fail to cancel with less than two days’ notice, your application will be destroyed and you have to start the entire process again. Doesn’t matter if your baby was in the hospital and has an extra hole in her bottom as a result. Nor does it matter if the test taker has an abscess and a missing filling, speaking of extra holes. Without going into the tedious details of applying for licensure in the state of Schwarzenegger, just know that getting the application together with documentation of thousands of clinical hours, continuing ed, and clinical supervision took forever and I would rather move to Detroit or get a job at Dairy Queen than do it again.

My cramming backdrop at the moment is strange but nice conference center hotel in Santa Rosa. Our 4 hour drive from home to here yielded NO naps from the wee ones. At least, we determined, they would be asleep by 6:30 and I could study, study, study.

We indulged in a vibrant dinner at my old friend Duskie’s award winning restaurant, Zazu. Anyone who lives within 3 hours of this restaurant must rush there and try everything on the sassy menu…and don’t even think of skipping the Better Nutters with Scharfenn-berger chocolate fondue dipping sauce for dessert.

Our children were insane when we got to the hotel. This being the one night ever that I’ve really needed them to go to bed somewhere close to normal bedtime, they rocked and rumpused around until after 9 pm. Which leaves the cramming a bit unmanageable. Mostly since I can’t seem to stay awake and my abscessing molar is throbbing despite my frequent doses of penicillin. Oh well.

This exam is already unbearable and annoying and I haven’t even taken it yet. In the exam prep books I purchased, the practice questions are prefaced with a statement about how poorly worded the actual exam will be… but that the authors of the prep books didn’t feel it would be helpful to also poorly word the practice questions. Fair enough. Keeping in mind that the authors opted to not poorly word the practice questions, the following sample question should give us all some disturbing indications as to just how very poorly written the actual questions are likely to be tomorrow morning in the testing chamber:

Question: You are providing services to a caseload of severely depressed clients of all ages. Many are medically ill or elderly. Some of your clients have been treated with only pharmacotherapy and psychotherapy, whereas other clients have also been treated with electroconvulsive therapy. As compared to your other clients, you should expect those who have been treated with ECT to be more likely to experience….

a) more rapid symptom reduction in a greater proportion of clients with a lower risk

b) more limited symptom reduction in a lesser proportion of clients with a lower risk

c) more limited symptom reduction but with a higher risk

d) more rapid symptom reduction but with a higher risk

As Osh would say, is this a fair question?

The whole thing just reeks of the insecurity of the social work profession. I’ll have to expand on that in another post – I need to get back to the gory business of cramming now. Oh, and the test is 240 minutes long. Why not just say 4 hours?

Last thing… if I have to read one more thing about god damned oedipal complexes I’m going to scream through the taupe halls of this lovely hotel screaming “Electra” and “penis envy”!!! I think the Oedipal stage is bullshit!! So fail me, dear misguided Board of Behavioral Sciences, for being a psychotherapeutic heretic.

boil gone bbbad cont’d

Cafe was packed this morning. When we arrived at 6:30 am to cook, arrange and generally transform the community center into the Lost Cafe, we were locked out. Searches in barns, calls to sleeping neighbors, and surprise early morning visits to people who might have a community center key finally yielded results and we were in. Behind by 30 minutes, Jamie and I had to move tables in a hurry and she whipped up veggie biscuits and gravy in anticipation of our loyal eaters.

With 6 orders up and all chairs full, the power went unexpectedly out leaving us impotent in the department of serving hot coffee. Kind of a silly obstacle for a CAFE. Dick begged for the cold surplus shot that had been sitting on the espresso maker for nearly an hour. At his behest, we warmed it on the stove and sold it to him.

By 10 am, we were sold out of all our muffins, coffee cakes, 4 batches of biscuits and gravy, and four dozen fresh farm eggs. Blase wasn’t afraid to glean breakfast from the discarded plates of other customers whose leftovers were destined for our colorful compost bucket. What a dedicated husband…

At 10:15, it was suggested that we could sell the compost – it looked so good.

Luckily, no one noticed the puffy mouse that lay in repose pinned beneath the snapper of an apparently effective trap on the shelf below the silverware.

Anyway, back to my cathartic, tell all “not all boils are created equal” story…..Lucky for us all, Nola responded well to the 3 rounds of intravenous antibiotics and gruesome abscess draining. Within 24 hours, we were discharged but encouraged to stay in a hotel for the night rather than taking her back to our remote home nearly 2 hours away. Many celebratory unagi rolls later, we all slept unrepentantly in a musty but thankfully scrub and scalpel-less hotel room.

We woke to find Nola smiling and interested in breakfast. No fever and no worsening of the abscess and so the pediatrician cleared us to go home. One more celebratory meal called us to the Big Blue Cafe where I fiendishly ordered a large bowl filled with rice milk mocha and a 4 pound breakfast burrito. Ahhh….. a few needed minutes of delightful relief and normalcy before my vision was abruptly distorted by a jagged diagonal line painted in prism light and flashing like a strobe. Oh shit, I thought, I just want to enjoy my burrito and rare coffee treat before dealing with a stroke or brain tumor or psychosis or whatever this weird lightning bolt means. I described it to Blase and sucked down my coffee. After 25 minutes, it went away. Reluctantly, I called the doctor and was encouraged to go to the hospital.

Back we went. Poor traumatized Nola clung to me and hid her face every time a person in scrubs passed by. She fell asleep on my chest during my triage interview and I caught a little bit of Obama’s press conference on the waiting room flat screen – a highlight of my week. (In case you’ve blocked this fact out, we don’t get television under the rock where we live. It simply isn’t possible). A fit and spunky doctor wearing a refreshingly bold party shirt asked me if I had a headache or was experiencing any nausea. Yes, I whispered in response, hoping that the hushed voice would keep Nola asleep a bit longer. The nausea and headache, though repulsive and uncomfortable, hadn’t seemed to be worth mentioning. Looking relieved, the doctor said definitively that I was experiencing a migraine. Further confirmation would come if the medication in the approaching syringe eliminated my symptoms. I was given the injection and then left in the room to react or not over the next 15 minutes. 5 minutes later, I felt flushed and lightheaded and knew I was about to faint. I scanned the room for options which would prevent my fall from harming the ailing baby strapped to my sweaty chest. I layed down on the crunchy paper covered exam table and put my feet in the air before tightening the straps on here carrier. After a few more weird visuals, I seemed to recover. This was an occasional side effect of the medication, the nurse explained when she returned to the room.

“Have a safe trip back to the boonies”, she said with a smile. Fresh air felt like a miracle as Nola awoke and we emerged from our strange medical home away from home to wait for the throbbing vehicular sound of our family, soon to pull into the driveway and whisk us away. Nola dragged me to the “life” sized Jesus statue that lorded over the hospital entrance and with a yawp, she gave him a jubilant high-five.