When you’re pretending to take a pic of your baby but really you want to check out a cute service dog.
As I type this on the seventh floor of Barts hospital in London, a bag of cyclophosphamide (a close relation of mustard gas) is being delivered straight into my heart via an arm-mounted catheter. I’m preparing for probably the biggest medical procedure I’ll ever have; a transplant of my sister’s stem cells that will hopefully cure me of an especially rare, aggressive form of lymphoma. I am at the complete mercy of the NHS. And I am entirely in support of the junior doctors’ strike.
Very often, if I start a piece I know is well-written and interesting and relevant to our interests, I will link to it and get a good pull-quote and move on without finishing it (this is endemic to online journalism, F.Y.I.) so when I literally cannot stop reading it, as was the case with this piece on Canada’s managed alcohol programmes (often known as “wet” shelters), it means I really, really hope you read all of it too:
The Oaks is a converted hotel next to a pawnshop, in Carlington, a working-class neighbourhood on the west side of Ottawa, Canada. When residents first arrive, they tend to drink the maximum, every hour, every day. Many also drink whatever they can buy or shoplift outside the building. For most, this gradually changes. They stop drinking outside, begin to ask for fewer ounces, skip pours or have a “special pour” of watered-down wine. Two residents get several hours’ worth at a time to take up to their rooms and ration out themselves. One man gave up alcohol but gets an hourly pour of grape juice, to stay part of the group.
Ten of the Oaks’ residents are mental health patients and don’t get the pour – just fewer than 50 others do. A few are women or younger men, but the majority are men in their 50s; it often takes several decades of drinking before people seek a different life and land here. Standard clothing in January was flannel pyjama bottoms and slippers with a down jacket. Many have long beards, dishevelled hair, and no front teeth – alcohol will do that. Most are sick. Years or decades of drinking have left them with liver, heart and brain damage that will never be reversed. A nurse is on site 40 hours a week. At least once a week and whenever necessary, a doctor and specialist nurses come to see patients. Young leads physical stretching groups, a book club, shopping trips and outings; Little Ray’s Reptile Zoo was a recent hit.
The pour is what makes the Oaks different from every other well-run facility of its kind. It solves the residents’ most urgent problem: where can I get a drink?
Doree Shafrir profiled Angela Flournoy, and it. is. great.
Flournoy is matter-of-fact about working within the system. “I’ve had wonderful experiences, but that doesn’t mean that it was not a host of white women. I just got the right mix of them who cared, who didn’t want to put me in a box. But if the deck had been shuffled any other way something else might have happened.”
Still, she’s pointedly critical of the ways in which white women in publishing can be ignorant of their own privilege. “It’s a lot of white women who are sort of passing the buck as far as what the issue is onto dudes who don’t exist. Yeah, they might be at the top, but they’re not reading the books. They’re excited about the books they’re telling you to get excited about…I think it’s an undue burden for the writer of color that’s just trying to get people to care about their book as much as other people’s books, to then also be the one to have the answers.”
weep:
Right before we were about to shoot him performing his new song in the episode, as he toured the set in his black shoes that lit up with a pink light when he walked, he asked my producer Erin O’Malley for a megaphone. People were called. A megaphone was found. Later, when the cameras were rolling, I stood in the back of the set and watched the song start. Right before the first notes, he pulled out the megaphone and called out: “Does anyone want to fall in love tonight?” Everyone cheered. We hadn’t asked them to. It was just a feeling. You just had to shout out. The megaphone made the song suddenly feel like a movement, like a political rally, like we were all standing there together that night in support of falling in love. It was brilliant.
This woman is a walking nightmare:
Bruner—a Republican candidate for the District 9 seat on the Texas State Board of Education, who came in just shy of the 50 percent she needed to bag the nomination on Super Tuesday—has yet to walk back her claims that President Barack Obama worked as a gay prostitute in his 20s, or that humans cohabited the earth with dinosaurs, or that sex-education classes “stimulate children to experiment with sex,” or that Islam “is not a real religion.” Bruner, bless her, has also suggested that Paul Ryan’s manly beard makes him look “like a terrorist” and that opposing the Common Core is right up there with objecting to National Socialism. (I could go on.)
I am sitting here reading this piece with my mouth hanging open at how ridiculous this country is (it’s older, but Nikki and I just read it yesterday for the first time):
Marcella qualified for Medi-Cal because she is disabled, but because Medi-Cal is for poor people, Dave and Marcella have to be poor to receive it — they have to “meet” the program’s “income test.” Counterintuitively, meeting the income test doesn’t mean having enough income (as in doing well on a test), but rather having low-enough income. The income test is actually an income limit.
Moreover, because Dave is employed, he and Marcella would be in a particular version of the program called “Share of Cost” Medi-Cal. It works this way: As a family of three with one disabled member, they are allowed to keep $2,100 of Dave’s $3,250 monthly earnings to live on. The rest of Dave’s earnings, $1,150, would go to Medi-Cal as the family’s share of cost. That is, any month in which Marcella incurred medical expenses, she and Dave must pay the first $1,150. To our surprise, if Dave earned more money, the extra amount would also go to Medi-Cal: The cost sharing is a 100 percent tax on Dave’s earnings. I figured out later that the $2,100 my brother and sister-in-law are to live on puts them at 133 percent of the federal poverty level for a family of three. Essentially, the way they meet the income test is for Medi-Cal to skim off Dave’s income until they are in fact poor. Brian noted that they are “lucky” that they are allowed to retain that much income; if Marcella weren’t disabled, the amount they’d be allowed to retain would be even lower than $2,100. And this is how things will be indefinitely. In order to get poor people’s health insurance, Dave and Marcella must stay poor, forever.
what:
Q. How to respect a vet on Memorial Day: My son has recently become friends with a boy whose father is a veteran (two tours in Afghanistan). My son’s birthday happens to be on Memorial Day weekend (Saturday, not the actual day on Monday), and when I mentioned a birthday party, the dad said his only plans that weekend were visiting graves of some of his friends, so they would be available. I immediately felt guilty for not thinking of that—like so many Americans, Memorial Day for me is a three-day weekend, and I feel heartless for not thinking of its actual meaning. Is there some way to recognize him for what he’s sacrificed and what he must be going through on that day? I should also mention that we are both (unhappily) married and we seem to be slightly mutually attracted to each other (we haven’t ever discussed it openly, and I don’t plan to and never would take action). So, while I’d like to recognize him, I don’t want to do it in a way that makes either of our spouses think something is going on. My husband does know that I would divorce him if I could afford to and am only staying to give my stepdaughter a communal home until she graduates high school next year. He also tends to be paranoid that I’m interested in every guy that I talk to, so I don’t want to give him any more reasons to be angry and feel justified in his disrespect toward me.
too excited to function:
< https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJ4FIGnJknk >
shit people say to women who write about sports
