The Human Pin Cushion
For those of you who are squeamish around needles or thinking about needles, this is your chance to stop before you go too far. The In-Vitro fertilization process involves a lot of self-administration, and I’m about to describe the process in some detail. WARNING! THIS IS NOT FOR THE FAINT OF HEART!!!
On the first day of full menstrual flow, I administer a small amount of Lupron subcutaneously. There are many sites to choose from, but I like to use the most effective spot—about an inch or two from the navel, in the fat layer on my belly. Then, the next day I go to the clinic, have my blood drawn, and a baseline ultrasound. The blood test is to ensure that I am not pregnant, and the ultrasound is to provide an accurate picture of my ovaries as they are stimulated over the next week. Then, it’s onto daily injections of Follistim, which stimulates my follicles. Sounds hot doesn’t it? Well, this FSH (follicle stimulating hormone) treatment encourages growth in number and size of ova (that’s eggs for you and me) in preparation for harvesting. In the protocol I have to follow, this twice daily regime of injections sometimes amount to three or four shots. Thankfully they have designed this pen device which delivers the drug using a micro-fine needle. However, it’s still a sharp, pointy object that pierces through flesh. In addition I also have to administer morning injections of Lupron and twice daily shots of Heparin, a blood thinner which is used to reduce my elevated antiphospholipid antibodies. Along with baby aspirin, this therapy encourages my body not to coagulate around the embryo and prevent it from developing a blood supply. In the very first cycle I had to administer Heparin, I got a bit carried away and began injecting myself rather…adamantly, and ended up with a section of bruising to rival any kick boxer after a rough fight. My belly was black and blue, and some parts looked a bit greenish too. It’s a bit ghoulish, but I kinda liked it.
On day seven, I go in for the first of my daily trips to the clinic. Each day they take my blood to check my estradiol level and to check the maturity and number of eggs. Ovary hyperstimulation can cause a whole bunch of very undesirable effects, including pelvic pain or discomfort, fluid retention, fever over 100 degrees, and decreased urine output, resulting in possible hospitalization, and estradiol levels let the doctors know exactly how much they can push my system to produce eggs and not reach hyperstimulation. These daily visits vary from 3-7 days, depending on my response to the protocol. Then, when it’s time, Ben gives me a shot of HCG (Human Chorionic Gonadotropin) which releases the eggs to be aspirated and harvested using a long needle which is pushed through the walls of the vagina, and in my case, through the uterus. At this point you may shiver and make groaning sounds of pain along with me. Ready? Get Set. Go. AAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHH!
Thirty-six hours after Ben gives me this HCG shot in the ass, or intramuscularly in the upper-outer quadrants of the buttocks, I am to be harvested. At the first egg collection, we asked the nurse to draw bull’s-eyes for where Ben should administer my progesterone shots, and he immediately nicknamed the diagram, “Mister Ass.” I’ll leave the elaboration for Ben. I have one night free from injections, and then it’s the nightly shot in the ass with a long and thick needle full of progesterone suspended in sesame oil. How’s that for ethnic appropriateness? This oil is very thick, and requires a steady and patient hand—both qualities which my husband possesses. Sometimes, when he hits a nerve (the sciatic, I’m told), sharp pain jolts through me, but now I’m mostly immune to it. You see, I was meant to give birth. My pain tolerance is ridiculously high, and should be put to good use, n’est-ce pas? I shall leave the embryo fertilization and transfer process for the next post, aptly subtitled, “God, I don’t want to pee on him. He’s too cute!”
Saturday, September 24, 2005
Thursday, September 15, 2005
The In-Vitro Play-by-Play: Prologue
Yesterday was the third month anniversary of my premature menopause, and this really means that I’m preparing for the fourth and final round of in-vtro fertilization. If this round does not produce a pregnancy, then we are through. It’s off to China adoption land we go, where we shall balance out the number of white ghosts who are stealing our Chinese babies out of the homeland. If I’m sounding bitter, it’s because I am. I am bitter and angry that I have to endure all of this, and that my marriage to the most wonderful man on the planet had to be tested in this fashion. If there’s a greater plan, then I just want to let the universe know that it sucks. Feeling like a failure is not my most-favored status, and this past year has made me feel like a failure. I have failed to produce “best-quality” eggs no matter how my “best-quality heart” has desired, and I have failed to let the precious embryos implant. They were the only true Yang Temkos on the planet, and I’ve let them go to waste. Those five little Yang Temki deserved a better place to land—not the embittered belly of a reproductive retard. (I never knew I was capable of such self-hatred) Gosh, sometimes I hate that stream-of-consciousness writing that GHP taught us now 18 years ago. Now that my senses have returned, the question to be answered is: How did a hopeful couple who carefully planned their path to parenthood end up here? Well, you’d never believe it.
Ben and I were meant to be parents. We knew from the very beginning that we wanted lots of kids, and that our first-born son would be named “Alexander.” Don’t know why, but we’ve always known. Then the plan formed. We would wait until I finished that damn doctorate, and then babies would flow from my womb. A year before we actually moved back to Atlanta, as I was nearing the end of my studies, I stopped taking the pill and we started trying. For the next four years we kept trying. I studied my basal body temperature, counted days, and monitored so many other things that I’ve stopped keeping track. We used to joke that we must be having “stupid sex,” and every month when my period came there was depression of great magnitude. Once we moved back home, the diagnostic odyssey began. Once we were both gainfully employed, my OB/GYN ordered several tests. The first was a metabolic blood panel, and this revealed that I was insulin resistant. Apparently this precursor to diabetes affects fertility and ovulation; however, he did not prescribe Glucophage, which is a way to regulate your body’s ability to use insulin. I could hold it against him, but then he's no fertility specialist. Also, I had to have a HSG (That’s Hystosalpingogram for you and me), which was humiliating, or so I had perceived at the time. Now I would consider it to be no big deal. In this test a catheter is inserted through the cervix, and then a dye is injected into the uterus to observe the flow of liquid through the fallopian tubes. This is to determine whether or not the tubes are blocked. The result was that my tubes were open. It was an uncomfortable test that bordered on painful (mind you I have one of the highest pain tolerances out there, so take it with a grain of salt). My OB/GYN ignored the radiologist’s observation that my uterus seemed a bit unusually uneven, and I’m still a little pissed off about it. This should have really been a clue to what was truly the matter with me. Meanwhile, Ben had to…give of himself into a cup and deliver it to the lab to see if there were enough boys and that they were swimming well. He scored highly on all fronts. Believing that there was nothing wrong physically, I was given a chart to monitor my basal body temperature and to set a schedule for intercourse, and we acted accordingly. Mind you we had lots of fun, but the disappointment at the monthly arrival of our “special friend” was becoming a serious bore. Another shameful year of nothingness went by, and I was finally ready to put that shame aside and see a specialist. We were referred to Reproductive Biology Associates, and at last we had an answer. I have endometriosis, and I’ve had it for at least twenty years.
When we heard the diagnosis we knew that we had been fucked over by the asinine doctors in south central Indiana. One of the signs of endometriosis is mid-cycle spotting that could not be eliminated by changing the strength of the pill or by adding estrogen in the form of Premarin. Looking back, this particular therapy probably exacerbated my endometriosis, since it feeds on extra estrogen. My Hoosier doctors decided that surely I had some form of venereal disease, and proceeded to test me for Gonorrhea and Chlamydia, over and over again. Each time when the results came back negative, they had nothing further to say. Ahh, Hoosier medicine is a great thing. They were lazy and failed to do one additional test that would have determined the actual cause—an ultrasound, or histosonogram. When Dr. Carol Mitchell-Leef performed the histosonogram, the resulting diagnosis could not have been clearer. Not only did I have endometriosis, I also had polyps in my uterus and my ovaries were full of blood, or endometriomas. It was bad, very bad, but she could not determine whether it was stage 3 or 4 until she could take a closer look. To make a very long story short, I was told to lose thirty pounds, take Glucophage, and to have laparoscopic surgery to remove polyps, adhesions, and have my ovaries drained of excess fluid. After surviving all of this, the In-Vitro fun started. Since this diatribe is now transforming into a saga of Wagnerian scope, I’d better take a break. Thus ends the prologue, even though I could go on about that damn surgery and how I sang a concert three days after having my insides shredded AND how I love the South Beach diet—it’s not just a diet, it’s a way of life.
Friday, September 09, 2005
Home, where my thoughts escape - Part one of ?
It figures that after the lengthy explanation of companion blogging and how the two blogs would interact that our first writing assignments to one another would be given offline. I was given a choice to write about one of three things:
As Wanda has noticed, I tend to compress all trips I ever took to any given location into one uber-trip encompassing all of the major events that I remember about that location. I don't think I do this any more, but given this propensity for mental melding I feel it best to leave that topic be for now.
As to what I'm reading... well, it's mostly mind candy. The only book I'm not slightly embarassed by is called, ironically enough, "Dungeon, Fire and Sword", and it's all about the Knights Templar and the politics behind the crusades, which I hope, at some point in my life, to meld into the kernel of the militaristic religious society at the center of this epic story I've been building in my head (and on various notes on a collection of small scraps of paper and journals) for the better part of 7 or 8 years now.
Now my neighborhood - here is some rich fodder! Alas, as I began to write I quickly found that I have far too many stories to tell. Just the first part of the story, about my own house, was going to cause a reader to have to scroll down about a thousand times before you hit the end. To avoid this I am going to start a mini-series about my neighborhood and the people in it, the length of which is at this time unknown. I promise not to make too much stuff up.
Part the First : Our House
I love our neighborhood. It couldn't be a better location, nestled smack in the middle of the rectangle formed by North Druid Hills Road, Clairmont Road, LaVista Road and Briarcliff Road, (the word "rectangle" is being used very loosely here and should under no circumstances be construed to imply that the shape those four roads make (or any 4 roads in Atlanta, when you get right down to it) even vaguely resembles one), and is less than a mile from Sam's Warehouse, Publix, Kroger, Starbuck's, CVS, Target, and Office Depot. It is also within a mile of a good bookstore (both a new bookstore and a used bookstore), a decent shoe store, and a cheap dry cleaners. It is less than that same mile from fabulous Indian, Greek, Thai and French restaurants, as well as an excellent liquor store where we can finally get our beloved Lagavulin single malt scotch. We're 3 minutes from the freeway, 10 minutes from Symphony Hall, a very different 10 minutes from WABE where Wanda works, and, on a good day, 25 minutes from where I work (on a bad day, 3 hours).
Here's an overhead, thanks to Google Maps:
It's a very green neighborhood, with lots of trees to insulate us from the noise from the freeway (even in the winter you cannot hear a single multi-car pileup on I85), if not the occasional airplane on its way to Dekalb Airport (the trees are not this tall). The ironic twist in the story is that when we lived in Bloomington, we thought we had things so great. We were only about 5 minutes from a Target, a Kroger, a shitty mall, and a super-shitty (but very, very loud) movie theater, the same 5 minutes from a Mexican Restaurant with the single best Mexican entree' I've ever had in my life (when Wanda and I used to go there for lunch, and they'd see our car pull up in the parking lot, they'd go ahead and put our order in and have drinks ready for us - we NEVER ordered anything else), and roughly 20 minutes from Sam's Warehouse. We talked about that great convenience as something we'd miss when we got back to Atlanta, and how we'd never be able to take less than an entire afternoon to go to Kroger, Sam's, and Target all in one fell shwoop (a SHopping sWOOP, if you will). It takes us signifigantly less time to do those things now than it did then.
If you had my address you could get this map from google maps yourself, and if you do I'll warn you that it's an older map. How do I know? First of all, the tightest zoom you can get actually shows both my front and back yards in moderate detail, and two very important details are missing:
My garden looks like this:
This picture was taken in the spring, mind you, when those 6 tomato plants were young. The garden is constructed of 3 separate plots; the two closest plots being 4'x4', made with landscaping timbers and a crapload of imported topsoil (like most yards in Georgia, my yard consists primarily of red clay and variously sized rocks), and the plot behind them being 8'x4'. The tomato crop this year was insane -the vines produced fruits numbering in the several hundreds and have only just produced their last. The long plot held 5 pepper vines of various types, and while I did manage to quadruple my pepper output from a year ago, that means I got four instead of just one. The things flowered like crazy but didn't fruit until I started ignoring them entirely. All I did was weed to make sure they weren't getting strangled, and one day I noticed that 3 of the 5 bushes had a tiny pepper on them. They didn't get very big, but even a tiny fresh pepper from the garden beats anything you'll get in any store. We scrambled one of them up in an omlette with leftover sausages from the grill.... heaven!
It's harder to show a picture of the back deck - the thing is just too frikking big. There's a collection of pictures here:
http://www.yangtemko.com/benjamin/test/deckdone/
And before you start grousing at me, be assured that I am well aware of the absurdity of a computer geek like me having that shitty of a personal space on the web. Eventually I'll get around to sprucing up the joint, but for the time being other matters take precedence.
Our house isn't very large - nothing like the McMansions which are sprouting up like weeds all around us - and with Wanda and I both wanting 4 kids it's probably going to undergo some significant personality changes over the course of the next decade or so, but it feels more like home than maybe anywhere I've lived since I stopped living, well, at home. The most interesting thing is how we came across it. Wanda and I had looked at many, many houses in Atlanta before we ever moved to Bloomington, including one right down the street from this one. When we were getting ready to move back to Atlanta we knew more or less where we wanted to live, and so were able to tell a realtor what we wanted in a general sense and our relative price range. So one weekend we plotted to come down and spend a day looking at houses, just to re-wet our feet in the waters of real estate, to mangle a metaphor. Our agent gave us the most brilliant house-hunting plan ever, one I hope you will steal and use for yourself:
For us, it was the first house we walked into that day. This house. It smelled like babies (the good baby smell, not the bad baby smell), it had hardwood floors, a deck, a galley kitchen with enormous cabinet capacity, 4 bedrooms, 2 full baths - in short, everything we wanted. We saw several other houses that day but the first one pulled us so strongly that we called the real estate agent that very afternoon and asked her why we wouldn't just go ahead and grab the first house. It's hard to explain what a big thing this is - of the maybe 50 or so houses that Wanda and I saw the first time around before we left for Indiana, not ONCE did we agree on any house as being the one. We spent a lot of time arguing about which concessions to make to imperfection, in fact, until it became a moot point. But this house, it just felt like home. Immediately. Interestingly, our real estate agent had exactly the same reaction to the house - in repeated conversations with her she couldn't get that house out of her head. She didn't even bother trying to sell us any other house - she knew that house was ours.
I have other stories to tell about our neighborhood, including:
- blog about a trip you took before your tenth birthday
- blog about what you're reading these days
- blog about your neighborhood
As Wanda has noticed, I tend to compress all trips I ever took to any given location into one uber-trip encompassing all of the major events that I remember about that location. I don't think I do this any more, but given this propensity for mental melding I feel it best to leave that topic be for now.
As to what I'm reading... well, it's mostly mind candy. The only book I'm not slightly embarassed by is called, ironically enough, "Dungeon, Fire and Sword", and it's all about the Knights Templar and the politics behind the crusades, which I hope, at some point in my life, to meld into the kernel of the militaristic religious society at the center of this epic story I've been building in my head (and on various notes on a collection of small scraps of paper and journals) for the better part of 7 or 8 years now.
Now my neighborhood - here is some rich fodder! Alas, as I began to write I quickly found that I have far too many stories to tell. Just the first part of the story, about my own house, was going to cause a reader to have to scroll down about a thousand times before you hit the end. To avoid this I am going to start a mini-series about my neighborhood and the people in it, the length of which is at this time unknown. I promise not to make too much stuff up.
Part the First : Our House
I love our neighborhood. It couldn't be a better location, nestled smack in the middle of the rectangle formed by North Druid Hills Road, Clairmont Road, LaVista Road and Briarcliff Road, (the word "rectangle" is being used very loosely here and should under no circumstances be construed to imply that the shape those four roads make (or any 4 roads in Atlanta, when you get right down to it) even vaguely resembles one), and is less than a mile from Sam's Warehouse, Publix, Kroger, Starbuck's, CVS, Target, and Office Depot. It is also within a mile of a good bookstore (both a new bookstore and a used bookstore), a decent shoe store, and a cheap dry cleaners. It is less than that same mile from fabulous Indian, Greek, Thai and French restaurants, as well as an excellent liquor store where we can finally get our beloved Lagavulin single malt scotch. We're 3 minutes from the freeway, 10 minutes from Symphony Hall, a very different 10 minutes from WABE where Wanda works, and, on a good day, 25 minutes from where I work (on a bad day, 3 hours).
Here's an overhead, thanks to Google Maps:
It's a very green neighborhood, with lots of trees to insulate us from the noise from the freeway (even in the winter you cannot hear a single multi-car pileup on I85), if not the occasional airplane on its way to Dekalb Airport (the trees are not this tall). The ironic twist in the story is that when we lived in Bloomington, we thought we had things so great. We were only about 5 minutes from a Target, a Kroger, a shitty mall, and a super-shitty (but very, very loud) movie theater, the same 5 minutes from a Mexican Restaurant with the single best Mexican entree' I've ever had in my life (when Wanda and I used to go there for lunch, and they'd see our car pull up in the parking lot, they'd go ahead and put our order in and have drinks ready for us - we NEVER ordered anything else), and roughly 20 minutes from Sam's Warehouse. We talked about that great convenience as something we'd miss when we got back to Atlanta, and how we'd never be able to take less than an entire afternoon to go to Kroger, Sam's, and Target all in one fell shwoop (a SHopping sWOOP, if you will). It takes us signifigantly less time to do those things now than it did then.
If you had my address you could get this map from google maps yourself, and if you do I'll warn you that it's an older map. How do I know? First of all, the tightest zoom you can get actually shows both my front and back yards in moderate detail, and two very important details are missing:
- My above-ground garden in the front yard,
- Our screened-in back porch.
My garden looks like this:
This picture was taken in the spring, mind you, when those 6 tomato plants were young. The garden is constructed of 3 separate plots; the two closest plots being 4'x4', made with landscaping timbers and a crapload of imported topsoil (like most yards in Georgia, my yard consists primarily of red clay and variously sized rocks), and the plot behind them being 8'x4'. The tomato crop this year was insane -the vines produced fruits numbering in the several hundreds and have only just produced their last. The long plot held 5 pepper vines of various types, and while I did manage to quadruple my pepper output from a year ago, that means I got four instead of just one. The things flowered like crazy but didn't fruit until I started ignoring them entirely. All I did was weed to make sure they weren't getting strangled, and one day I noticed that 3 of the 5 bushes had a tiny pepper on them. They didn't get very big, but even a tiny fresh pepper from the garden beats anything you'll get in any store. We scrambled one of them up in an omlette with leftover sausages from the grill.... heaven!
It's harder to show a picture of the back deck - the thing is just too frikking big. There's a collection of pictures here:
http://www.yangtemko.com/benjamin/test/deckdone/
And before you start grousing at me, be assured that I am well aware of the absurdity of a computer geek like me having that shitty of a personal space on the web. Eventually I'll get around to sprucing up the joint, but for the time being other matters take precedence.
Our house isn't very large - nothing like the McMansions which are sprouting up like weeds all around us - and with Wanda and I both wanting 4 kids it's probably going to undergo some significant personality changes over the course of the next decade or so, but it feels more like home than maybe anywhere I've lived since I stopped living, well, at home. The most interesting thing is how we came across it. Wanda and I had looked at many, many houses in Atlanta before we ever moved to Bloomington, including one right down the street from this one. When we were getting ready to move back to Atlanta we knew more or less where we wanted to live, and so were able to tell a realtor what we wanted in a general sense and our relative price range. So one weekend we plotted to come down and spend a day looking at houses, just to re-wet our feet in the waters of real estate, to mangle a metaphor. Our agent gave us the most brilliant house-hunting plan ever, one I hope you will steal and use for yourself:
- See a house.
- See the next house. Compare it with the first. Choose between the two.
- See the next house. Compare it with your current favorite. Choose between the two.
- Goto 3.
For us, it was the first house we walked into that day. This house. It smelled like babies (the good baby smell, not the bad baby smell), it had hardwood floors, a deck, a galley kitchen with enormous cabinet capacity, 4 bedrooms, 2 full baths - in short, everything we wanted. We saw several other houses that day but the first one pulled us so strongly that we called the real estate agent that very afternoon and asked her why we wouldn't just go ahead and grab the first house. It's hard to explain what a big thing this is - of the maybe 50 or so houses that Wanda and I saw the first time around before we left for Indiana, not ONCE did we agree on any house as being the one. We spent a lot of time arguing about which concessions to make to imperfection, in fact, until it became a moot point. But this house, it just felt like home. Immediately. Interestingly, our real estate agent had exactly the same reaction to the house - in repeated conversations with her she couldn't get that house out of her head. She didn't even bother trying to sell us any other house - she knew that house was ours.
I have other stories to tell about our neighborhood, including:
- The Stupidest Fucking Dog On The Planet
- The Second Stupidest Fucking Dog On The Planet
- Wascally Wabbits, And How To Cope With Them
- The Greek Festival, or, The Revenge of Disco Jesus
- Good Fences Make Good Neighbors
Monday, September 05, 2005
Remote Control Terrorism
You might call me something of a technology freak. I love gadgets, always have. I fall short of my brother's titanic curiosity for gadgets - he has always possesed the mystic ability able to take them apart and successfully put them back together again, while I have only ever been able to manage taking them apart, with varying degrees of success in reassembling (though the median is very close to 0 (and yes I do SO mean median - sometimes I did more damage trying to put them back together than I did in taking them apart)). In the intervening time between childhood (defined roughly as, oh, I don't know, last week?) and now I have discovered 2 important theorms about taking something apart:
Anywy, being the scatterbrain that I am, I quickly leaped onto the PDA bandwagon. My first PDA was the first Handspring Visor they ever made. It had like 3 colors and enough memory to hold 10 phone numbers if you didn't mind it forgetting one every now and then. But, it was very slick, had a memory expansion slot (an unheard of feautre of PDA's in 1999), and made me the envy of the computer lab where I worked at IU.
I had this device for 4 years, and it served me faithfully until one fatal evening last year. I was leaving work, exiting my building on the top floor (of three) onto the external stairwell. I was putting my Visor (wrapped cozily in its neoprene rubber carrying case) into safe keeping in my internal jacket lining pocket when I fumbled it. It literally leaped out of my hand for no reason I can think of, bounced perfectly on end and, the case being rubber, bounded down the half-flight of stairs where by all rights it should have knocked against the railing and come to a halt. It did not. Its last bounce caught a funny angle as it flipped sideways and snuck through the bars of the railing, plummeting the 30 feet to the parking lot below.
"Well," I thought to myself, "it's in a sturdy rubber carrying case, it might be OK!"
I ran to the balcony and looked down to see that the thing had taken a flying leap so that instead of falling nicely into the bushes below the railing, it was instead lying in a puddle of water on the pavement.
"Well," I thought to myself, "it's water - resistant, it might still be OK!"
At this time a car backed out of a spot directly adjacent to the puddle, backed directly over my PDA case, and then drove over it again as it pulled foward and made its getaway.
"Well," I thought to myself, "That about does it."
Sure enough, I fished the poor thing out of the water, unzipped the case and saw a signifigantly flattened PDA with shattered touch screen, and I'm reasonably certain that no amount of taking-apart-and-putting-back-together was going to cure it. Time for a new toy!
Enter my current PDA, a Sony Clie' NX-60. It has many features which I adore, but my favorite by far has to be the built-in universal remote control. Since almost all PDAs come with an infra-red port for transferring files and sharing contact information with other PDAs, it seemed logical to Sony to beef that sucker up and make it strong enough to control other components, like stereos, cd players, TVs and the like. The Clie comes with a universal remote control interface and thousands upon thousands of pre-programmed remote control codes for various components.
If you're like me, this is a clear invitation to create mayhem. The first time I ever got to use this feature was while eating lunch with the St. Philips Cathedral Choir after a service. It is the habit of this group to grab lunch at any one of many local eateries after the 11:45 service (which gets out at around 1:00, if the guy facing the other way is especially long-winded, or if there are many babies in need of washing); on this particular day we were at the Rock Bottom Brewery. I was seated at the end of the table, which was perfect since the tennis match I wanted to watch was showing on the TV directly in front of me. I made vague references to the conversation around me while maintaining steady, relentless focus on the match. It was a VERY good match (although the only thing I remember about it now is that Justine Henin was playing), and I was enjoying my lunch immensely when all of a sudden the TV flickers and golf appears on the screen.
I am a tennis fan. A completely over-the-wall tennis fan. I love to play it, watch it, talk about it - if you really want to get me in a dudgeon you get me talking about why Atlanta has not one fucking professional tennis tournament despite having the Stone Mountain Tennis Center, a world-class facility (where Wanda and I saw Andre and Lindsay win gold medals). I have more than 80 matches from as far back as 1987 archived on VHS tapes. I grew up idolizing first McEnroe, then Lendl, then Miloslav Mecir (The Big Cat, as he was known, moved like a goddamn ghost, was known for his gleeful mauling of all Swedes on tour), Edberg, Agassi (ask Wanda about the shorts), Becker, Slobodan Zivojinovic (I swear that's a real name), Dr. Dirt (not a muppet), Pete Sampras, and now I dream of hitting just one shot like Roger Federer.
Suffice it to say, I was not pleased.
I then remembered that I had in my possession the means by which I could set my situation to rights again. I looked at the TV.
Sanyo.
Brought out my Clie and put it into universal remote mode. Selected TV-> Sanyo. Clicked the "last channel" button.
TENNIS!
Aw, yeah. I put the Clie down and happily resumed my meal. A few minutes later the waitress comes by. She looks at the TV as she's walking to her station and I see her do a classic double-take. Now, I know she's thinking to herself, "Hunh! I thought I changed that channel!" And sure enough, she picks up her remote and changes the channel again.
GOLF!
She puts down her remote, and the second she has her back turned I hit the "last channel" button again.
TENNIS!
A few minutes later the waitress is coming back through her station and does an identical, spot-on match of her first double-take. I can really see the wheels turning now, she's convinced that something is wrong. This time I'm ready. She changes the channel.
GOLF!
I don't wait for her to walk away this time, I immediately hit "last channel" while she still has the remote in her hand.
TENNIS!
She emits a little gasp of horror, looks at the remote as if it were stinging her hand.
GOLF!
TENNIS!
GOLF!
TENNIS!
GOLF!
TENNIS!
GOLF!
TENNIS!
She gives a little scream, drops the remote onto her station board with a loud clatter and scurries off. A few minutes later she comes back with bull-necked managerial type in tow.
"Frank," she says plaintively, "This is really wierd, you got to watch this! Watch what happens when I try to change the channel here!" She picks up the remote and flourishes it at the TV.
GOLF!
I don't do anything. The waitress is shaking a little bit, staring at the screen so hard I'm sure an alien is going to leap out of her skin and demand to know what the hell is going on. The TV remains tuned to golf. Frank the bull-necked manager glances about as askance at Waitress as I've ever seen anyone glance askancefully at anyone else, shakes his head and stalks away muttering something I wish I could have heard. The waitress is now looking at the remote, stunned. I'm looking at her. When she lifts her eyes from the remote to the TV, I strike.
TENNIS!
The waitress screams again, louder this time, throws the remote onto the ground, shattering it into many pieces and beyond all hope of further disassembling (at least, not without some serious government clearance and access to a LOT of electricity), and runs off - we do not see her the rest of our lunch; nor did anyone try to come and change my fucking channel.
Game, set, match.
My brother, who has a left-hander's view on mayhem, has an absolutely brilliant idea that involves going to a crowded, rowdy bar where some very important sporting event, such as a college football bowl game, or a super bowl or world series game is being shown on a big-screen TV, waiting until some culminating moment and at the very apex of tension, turning off the TV. The closest I've yet come to this is being at a sports bar in Chicago with my dad and my brother, drinking some damned fine beer and randomly turning off TVs behind the bar, to the great annoyance of the barkeeps. At one point some very large, burly men starting cycling through the crowd looking for the asshole with the remote; if anything is true, though, it's that a table with almost any three guys at it has a hard time looking more harmless than a table with me, my dad and my brother sitting at it, beers in hand talking about architecture, which is what we were doing in between pissing off bartenders. The Clie looks nothing like a remote, and so is the perfect weapon for a crime whose victims need to get out more anyway.
I haven't used the Clie for this sort of thing in a long time. I should probably start taking it out with me again to keep in practice, only it has developed an alarming tendancy to chew through a fully charged battery in about 8 - 10 minutes. A new Clie battery costs about $50, which isn't so bad, but...
I wonder what kind of new toy I can get?
- If you take a device apart and put it back together again, you will always find a part that you left out sitting on the table or floor next to where you were working, the absence of which doesn't seem to affect the operation of the device at all.
By repeated application of this theorm, if you take something apart and put it back together again enough times, it will eventually not have anything left in it at all and will continue to function perfectly. - Sometimes the only thing that's need to fix something is to take it apart, nose around in it for a few minutes, and then put it back together again, optionally saying something like "That should do it," without having actually done anything at all.
Anywy, being the scatterbrain that I am, I quickly leaped onto the PDA bandwagon. My first PDA was the first Handspring Visor they ever made. It had like 3 colors and enough memory to hold 10 phone numbers if you didn't mind it forgetting one every now and then. But, it was very slick, had a memory expansion slot (an unheard of feautre of PDA's in 1999), and made me the envy of the computer lab where I worked at IU.
I had this device for 4 years, and it served me faithfully until one fatal evening last year. I was leaving work, exiting my building on the top floor (of three) onto the external stairwell. I was putting my Visor (wrapped cozily in its neoprene rubber carrying case) into safe keeping in my internal jacket lining pocket when I fumbled it. It literally leaped out of my hand for no reason I can think of, bounced perfectly on end and, the case being rubber, bounded down the half-flight of stairs where by all rights it should have knocked against the railing and come to a halt. It did not. Its last bounce caught a funny angle as it flipped sideways and snuck through the bars of the railing, plummeting the 30 feet to the parking lot below.
"Well," I thought to myself, "it's in a sturdy rubber carrying case, it might be OK!"
I ran to the balcony and looked down to see that the thing had taken a flying leap so that instead of falling nicely into the bushes below the railing, it was instead lying in a puddle of water on the pavement.
"Well," I thought to myself, "it's water - resistant, it might still be OK!"
At this time a car backed out of a spot directly adjacent to the puddle, backed directly over my PDA case, and then drove over it again as it pulled foward and made its getaway.
"Well," I thought to myself, "That about does it."
Sure enough, I fished the poor thing out of the water, unzipped the case and saw a signifigantly flattened PDA with shattered touch screen, and I'm reasonably certain that no amount of taking-apart-and-putting-back-together was going to cure it. Time for a new toy!
Enter my current PDA, a Sony Clie' NX-60. It has many features which I adore, but my favorite by far has to be the built-in universal remote control. Since almost all PDAs come with an infra-red port for transferring files and sharing contact information with other PDAs, it seemed logical to Sony to beef that sucker up and make it strong enough to control other components, like stereos, cd players, TVs and the like. The Clie comes with a universal remote control interface and thousands upon thousands of pre-programmed remote control codes for various components.
If you're like me, this is a clear invitation to create mayhem. The first time I ever got to use this feature was while eating lunch with the St. Philips Cathedral Choir after a service. It is the habit of this group to grab lunch at any one of many local eateries after the 11:45 service (which gets out at around 1:00, if the guy facing the other way is especially long-winded, or if there are many babies in need of washing); on this particular day we were at the Rock Bottom Brewery. I was seated at the end of the table, which was perfect since the tennis match I wanted to watch was showing on the TV directly in front of me. I made vague references to the conversation around me while maintaining steady, relentless focus on the match. It was a VERY good match (although the only thing I remember about it now is that Justine Henin was playing), and I was enjoying my lunch immensely when all of a sudden the TV flickers and golf appears on the screen.
I am a tennis fan. A completely over-the-wall tennis fan. I love to play it, watch it, talk about it - if you really want to get me in a dudgeon you get me talking about why Atlanta has not one fucking professional tennis tournament despite having the Stone Mountain Tennis Center, a world-class facility (where Wanda and I saw Andre and Lindsay win gold medals). I have more than 80 matches from as far back as 1987 archived on VHS tapes. I grew up idolizing first McEnroe, then Lendl, then Miloslav Mecir (The Big Cat, as he was known, moved like a goddamn ghost, was known for his gleeful mauling of all Swedes on tour), Edberg, Agassi (ask Wanda about the shorts), Becker, Slobodan Zivojinovic (I swear that's a real name), Dr. Dirt (not a muppet), Pete Sampras, and now I dream of hitting just one shot like Roger Federer.
Suffice it to say, I was not pleased.
I then remembered that I had in my possession the means by which I could set my situation to rights again. I looked at the TV.
Sanyo.
Brought out my Clie and put it into universal remote mode. Selected TV-> Sanyo. Clicked the "last channel" button.
TENNIS!
Aw, yeah. I put the Clie down and happily resumed my meal. A few minutes later the waitress comes by. She looks at the TV as she's walking to her station and I see her do a classic double-take. Now, I know she's thinking to herself, "Hunh! I thought I changed that channel!" And sure enough, she picks up her remote and changes the channel again.
GOLF!
She puts down her remote, and the second she has her back turned I hit the "last channel" button again.
TENNIS!
A few minutes later the waitress is coming back through her station and does an identical, spot-on match of her first double-take. I can really see the wheels turning now, she's convinced that something is wrong. This time I'm ready. She changes the channel.
GOLF!
I don't wait for her to walk away this time, I immediately hit "last channel" while she still has the remote in her hand.
TENNIS!
She emits a little gasp of horror, looks at the remote as if it were stinging her hand.
GOLF!
TENNIS!
GOLF!
TENNIS!
GOLF!
TENNIS!
GOLF!
TENNIS!
She gives a little scream, drops the remote onto her station board with a loud clatter and scurries off. A few minutes later she comes back with bull-necked managerial type in tow.
"Frank," she says plaintively, "This is really wierd, you got to watch this! Watch what happens when I try to change the channel here!" She picks up the remote and flourishes it at the TV.
GOLF!
I don't do anything. The waitress is shaking a little bit, staring at the screen so hard I'm sure an alien is going to leap out of her skin and demand to know what the hell is going on. The TV remains tuned to golf. Frank the bull-necked manager glances about as askance at Waitress as I've ever seen anyone glance askancefully at anyone else, shakes his head and stalks away muttering something I wish I could have heard. The waitress is now looking at the remote, stunned. I'm looking at her. When she lifts her eyes from the remote to the TV, I strike.
TENNIS!
The waitress screams again, louder this time, throws the remote onto the ground, shattering it into many pieces and beyond all hope of further disassembling (at least, not without some serious government clearance and access to a LOT of electricity), and runs off - we do not see her the rest of our lunch; nor did anyone try to come and change my fucking channel.
Game, set, match.
My brother, who has a left-hander's view on mayhem, has an absolutely brilliant idea that involves going to a crowded, rowdy bar where some very important sporting event, such as a college football bowl game, or a super bowl or world series game is being shown on a big-screen TV, waiting until some culminating moment and at the very apex of tension, turning off the TV. The closest I've yet come to this is being at a sports bar in Chicago with my dad and my brother, drinking some damned fine beer and randomly turning off TVs behind the bar, to the great annoyance of the barkeeps. At one point some very large, burly men starting cycling through the crowd looking for the asshole with the remote; if anything is true, though, it's that a table with almost any three guys at it has a hard time looking more harmless than a table with me, my dad and my brother sitting at it, beers in hand talking about architecture, which is what we were doing in between pissing off bartenders. The Clie looks nothing like a remote, and so is the perfect weapon for a crime whose victims need to get out more anyway.
I haven't used the Clie for this sort of thing in a long time. I should probably start taking it out with me again to keep in practice, only it has developed an alarming tendancy to chew through a fully charged battery in about 8 - 10 minutes. A new Clie battery costs about $50, which isn't so bad, but...
I wonder what kind of new toy I can get?
Thursday, September 01, 2005
They Must Come in Threes
As I inch closer to the end of my chemically-induced menopause, I am faced with a spooky convergence. I have learned that in my life good and bad things come in a three-pack, and I’ve come to the realization that another has surfaced. Just like the month after Ben and I got engaged when three of my former gentlemen-callers came a callin’, the forces of destiny seem to be screaming to me that China Adoption is what awaits us at the end of this procreant journey. First, I bumped into the Great Wall China Adoption Agency’s workshop facilitators/China Adoptive parents at a meeting for a tsunami benefit that I’ll be MCing. Then, my sister’s mother-in-law sends an article about a couple in Topeka, Kansas, who’ve recently adopted an adorable little girl from China with Great Wall. Finally, Great Wall sends me an email reminder of an upcoming seminar/workshop. I am just Chinese enough and superstitious enough to believe. At a time like this reason does not reign. The emotional devastation from another failed IVF attempt is unfathomable, but I suppose we’ll still go on trying to become parents one way or another. Maybe this is the way the universe is trying to tell me to prepare for the worst?
What in the Wide Wide World of Sports...
So let me explain this business about a "Companion Blog".
No, there is too much. Let me sum up.
It starts a long, long time ago, in an institute of higher learning right down the road from here called Emory University. I arrived there in 1988 as a stupid, self-righteous, highly egotistical shithead. I cannot stress this point to you enough - I had no idea what I was doing, who I was, or what I wanted from life. What I did have, in spades, was an excess of self-confidence about how fucking smart I was. Sometimes, that self-confidence was all that kept me going. Luckily for me, I started meeting people who were actually every bit as smart as I thought I was. They thought the way I thought, they talked the way I talked, they read as much as I did and more, and they were a lot funnier than I was, and I would have told you back then that I was pretty fucking funny. These people taught me that I really was as smart as I thought I was, and that I could be that way and drop the excessive bullshit around it; that self-belief did not have to mutually exclude belief in others.
I'm a stubborn man, but I like to think I learned this lesson well.
One of these very bright, very funny, terribly erudite people was Megan. If for no other reason, Megan would win top awards for introducing me to one Wanda Yang, now Wanda Yang Temko, my greatest, bestest friend and co-author of this here blog. But wait, there's more.
She and I were good friends during our Emory days, but, as will happen with all human relationships there was ebb and flow in the amount of time and attention we had. Besides which, once Wanda and I were properly aligned, I had very little time I wished to spend anywhere else at all. It also should be noted that Wanda and Megan were much better friends with eachother than Wanda and I were friends with one another. In fact, you could almost say that Wanda, well... Wanda wished I would drop dead.
But that's a story for another time.
Over the years, the collective Yang Temkos and Megan were out of touch entirely with one another(s?). It wasn't until we returned from our exile in Bloomington that we finally reconnected with her, which was a delightful experience for us all. It seems that, in the intervening space, we'd all become pretty fucking interesting froods (and nobody had farther to go than I did, so this is a signifigant achievement), but more to the point the connection we all had each to the other was still strong, and meaningful, and worth building upon. Friends like Megan don't come around every dynasty.
Well, now Megan is experiencing an exile of her own. She might not have chosen hers in the same way that we chose ours, but I do not believe it is a stretch to suggest that Megan thinks of Atlanta as home. And rather than falling out of touch with her again, as would be relatively easy to do even in this golden age of communication, we have all agreed to stay in touch as thoroughly as possible, to keep a feeling of anchoring for her here should she ever find a way to come back.
Now, I have resisted the blogging trend for a long time, despite its obvious application to my occasional need to rant, or to relate an amusing anecdote about something that happened, or even just to make some shit up. But, as I alluded to in an earlier post, some things are becoming manifestly clear to me as I age.
Given this, it seems obvious that I ought to start developing other skills I can use to make a living, skills that don't require me to spin my wheels quite so fast in order to keep up. I have always loved to write, and sometimes I even write well. Unfortunately, I seem to have had trouble focusing for any length of time on any length of writing. I have two stories in my head currently. One of them is a short story, the other is epic in scope, and as much as I love it, I'm not ready to write it yet, not by a long shot. As it happens, my good friend Megan is a dramaturg of signifigant accomplishment (if you want to know what that means, I suggest you ask her) so now the path seems abundantly clear.
Enter the Companion Blog.
We kill so many birds with one stone it's a wonder the Audubon Society hasn't sent us a cease and desist. We all get to keep in touch. Megan has a forum in which to keep friends and family up to date (which I, as the official geek-in-residence to all of my friends, am all too happy to manage on her behalf), and as an extra bit of fun, Megan and I will occasionally give one another writing assignments to do, riffing on a theme of a post on one of our blogs, or maybe just making something up because it's interesting. Along with the posting on topics with which we are both comfortable with, it is my hope that we can take one another out or our respective comfort zones, enough to keep the experience organic, alive, human. It seems clear to me that I am getting more out of this deal than she is, but as long as she's willing to go along with it, I'm a fool not to take her up on it.
Blog On, Wanda!
Blog On, Megan!
(er... on Dancer and Vixen!)
No, there is too much. Let me sum up.
It starts a long, long time ago, in an institute of higher learning right down the road from here called Emory University. I arrived there in 1988 as a stupid, self-righteous, highly egotistical shithead. I cannot stress this point to you enough - I had no idea what I was doing, who I was, or what I wanted from life. What I did have, in spades, was an excess of self-confidence about how fucking smart I was. Sometimes, that self-confidence was all that kept me going. Luckily for me, I started meeting people who were actually every bit as smart as I thought I was. They thought the way I thought, they talked the way I talked, they read as much as I did and more, and they were a lot funnier than I was, and I would have told you back then that I was pretty fucking funny. These people taught me that I really was as smart as I thought I was, and that I could be that way and drop the excessive bullshit around it; that self-belief did not have to mutually exclude belief in others.
I'm a stubborn man, but I like to think I learned this lesson well.
One of these very bright, very funny, terribly erudite people was Megan. If for no other reason, Megan would win top awards for introducing me to one Wanda Yang, now Wanda Yang Temko, my greatest, bestest friend and co-author of this here blog. But wait, there's more.
- Late night rehearsals of James Taylor's 3-part arrangement of "That Lonesome Road" in the atrium of the DUC.
- Encouragement while arranging "This Island Earth" for the now defunct (in fact, for the almost immediately defunct) A-Capella group we attempted to form, and for letting me believe that it was only 4 parts, and not 5, as it clearly is.
- Introduction to more authors than I knew existed.
- Always willing to listen.
She and I were good friends during our Emory days, but, as will happen with all human relationships there was ebb and flow in the amount of time and attention we had. Besides which, once Wanda and I were properly aligned, I had very little time I wished to spend anywhere else at all. It also should be noted that Wanda and Megan were much better friends with eachother than Wanda and I were friends with one another. In fact, you could almost say that Wanda, well... Wanda wished I would drop dead.
But that's a story for another time.
Over the years, the collective Yang Temkos and Megan were out of touch entirely with one another(s?). It wasn't until we returned from our exile in Bloomington that we finally reconnected with her, which was a delightful experience for us all. It seems that, in the intervening space, we'd all become pretty fucking interesting froods (and nobody had farther to go than I did, so this is a signifigant achievement), but more to the point the connection we all had each to the other was still strong, and meaningful, and worth building upon. Friends like Megan don't come around every dynasty.
Well, now Megan is experiencing an exile of her own. She might not have chosen hers in the same way that we chose ours, but I do not believe it is a stretch to suggest that Megan thinks of Atlanta as home. And rather than falling out of touch with her again, as would be relatively easy to do even in this golden age of communication, we have all agreed to stay in touch as thoroughly as possible, to keep a feeling of anchoring for her here should she ever find a way to come back.
Now, I have resisted the blogging trend for a long time, despite its obvious application to my occasional need to rant, or to relate an amusing anecdote about something that happened, or even just to make some shit up. But, as I alluded to in an earlier post, some things are becoming manifestly clear to me as I age.
- Computers are a young man's game. The constant drive to keep up with every facet of available technology requires an enormous expenditure of energy. At this time in my life I can easily keep up; I even enjoy keeping up.
- This cannot possibly remain the case indefinitely.
Given this, it seems obvious that I ought to start developing other skills I can use to make a living, skills that don't require me to spin my wheels quite so fast in order to keep up. I have always loved to write, and sometimes I even write well. Unfortunately, I seem to have had trouble focusing for any length of time on any length of writing. I have two stories in my head currently. One of them is a short story, the other is epic in scope, and as much as I love it, I'm not ready to write it yet, not by a long shot. As it happens, my good friend Megan is a dramaturg of signifigant accomplishment (if you want to know what that means, I suggest you ask her) so now the path seems abundantly clear.
Enter the Companion Blog.
We kill so many birds with one stone it's a wonder the Audubon Society hasn't sent us a cease and desist. We all get to keep in touch. Megan has a forum in which to keep friends and family up to date (which I, as the official geek-in-residence to all of my friends, am all too happy to manage on her behalf), and as an extra bit of fun, Megan and I will occasionally give one another writing assignments to do, riffing on a theme of a post on one of our blogs, or maybe just making something up because it's interesting. Along with the posting on topics with which we are both comfortable with, it is my hope that we can take one another out or our respective comfort zones, enough to keep the experience organic, alive, human. It seems clear to me that I am getting more out of this deal than she is, but as long as she's willing to go along with it, I'm a fool not to take her up on it.
Blog On, Wanda!
Blog On, Megan!
(er... on Dancer and Vixen!)
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