After 215 posts every third day over the last 21 months, I find that I'm running out of things to say and that the regular blogging is no longer an unalloyed pleasure.  So I'm going to move to an irregular (and less frequent) schedule.  I'll focus on health matters, though I'm sure there will be political topics that rile me up enough to write a blog.

Thanks to all of you who have followed along for nearly two years now.  Check back from time to time, as I will continue to update the blog.

Tempus fugit ... except when it doesn't.  I have a paradoxical relationship with time these days--almost unaware of its passing day to day, all too conscious of its passing hour by hour and month by month.

At the daily level, one day is pretty much like the last.  Yesterday I was writing a rare check, and I was ready to guess that the date was about the tenth--only nine days off when I took the time to look at my phone.  When friends ask how the last few days have been, I often can't remember.  Was yesterday a good day or a bad one?  You'd think that would be an easy response, but they all blur together.  I have no schedule, except that every third day I write this blog, and, as many of you have probably noticed, it's become more and more difficult to vary the content.  Luckily, Mohamed does have a schedule, so I'm vaguely aware of which days we need to set the alarm and he'll be off to school.  But even that doesn't affect me much.  Time on a daily basis is marked more by naps vs. bursts of energy than by the difference between days.  I know that no matter what time I get up, after three hours, a black wave will strike, and I'll fall into bed and sleep for an hour.  I know that when I wake up, I'll finally shower and have lunch--and those will be my big accomplishments for that period.  By 1:30 or so, the wave will strike again, and this time I'll collapse for two hours.  That schedule is absolutely predictable.  Except for another flagging of energy about 6:00 or 6:30, I'll be good till 11 or so.  Monday or Thursday, weekday or weekend, it doesn't make any difference.  And most of the time, I'm not sure anyway whether it is Monday or Thursday, weekday or weekend.  It may be frustrating, but that's the way it works. 

But on another level, I'm very aware of and good at counting time.  It was three years ago this month--October 2010--that my left shoulder had hurt so long that I decided I needed to see a doctor.  I was still teaching, and as a leftie, I couldn't lift my hand high enough to write on the board so that the students could see what I'd written.  It was three years ago that I went to my doctor and had an x-ray that seemingly showed nothing.  It was three years ago that I began six months of misdiagnosed treatment--cortisone shots, physical therapy for a torn rotator cuff or then bursitis.  And it was exactly 2½ years ago that I had an MRI and first heard the word 'tumor.'  Since the prognosis for stage 4 kidney cancer is less than a year, that meant that I was given six months tops.  But I didn't really have time to concentrate on that because I had an immediate operation on my right femur and hip and had to spend the next 46 days (every one of which I counted down) 24/7 in an abduction brace.  The 46 days did come to an end, and I took tentative steps.  I mastered the seven steps to the two upstairs bathrooms. 

October 2011, my latest "expiration" date, came and went.  As did October 2012.  As is October 2013.  I count the months all right.  And as much as get tired of looking at the bottles of pills and swallowing my Votrient, as much as I get tired of being tired, of taking a shower and putting on clean clothes as my major accomplishment of the morning, I know how fortunate I am to have the Votrient to take.

Cancer, shmancer, abi gesund.  The only problem is that I can't remember if I was 'gesund' yesterday or not.

So after sixteen days with nothing accomplished, the government shutdown and debt ceiling crisis are over...for another three months.

The Daily Beast stole my line:  Is Ted Cruz the Miley Cyrus of the Republican party?

Tea Party representative Jack Kingston of George was on "All In" last night.  After Chris Hayes had said that the shutdown had cost the economy $24B, Kingston said that it had been a "minor inconvenience" that allowed Republicans to express their dislike of Obamacare.  Hayes interrupted: "Do you think there is a single American who didn't already know what Republicans think?"  Kingston was so flustered that he couldn't say 'shutdown': "The government shirtdone...shortdorn...sh...sh...closing..." 

The pundits don't seem to agree about much, except that this was a disaster for the GOP.  What about Speaker Boehner's future?  One said, "the jig is up," and he's done as speaker.  Another said he would be finished, but there is no one else who wants the job.  (I thought Eric Cantor, always walking one step behind, had his knife unsheathed.)  Still others said Boehner came out of this stronger because, despite the fact that he got no concessions, he stood up with the Tea Party and gained a bit more of their confidence. 

Other than the obvious economic damage--both to the overall economy and in personal lives--sixteen days passed when nothing was accomplished.  Major issues and problems were ignored: jobs creation, stimulus programs, the disappearing middle class, the increasing number of poor (and, according to a Pew survey, for the first time ever an increasing number of people label themselves as poor rather than as middle class; no matter how inaccurate the latter description might have been, there was still a sense of hope and belonging), climate change, immigration reform, and the list could go on. 

For the last three days, President Obama and other Democrats have been talking again about comprehensive immigration reform.  It's probably the next issue that the Congress will address, and the thought seems to be that there is some hope, as the President now has more evident strength and the Republicans are in disarray.  Will the Tea Partiers dare confront the President and such Senate leaders of their own party as John McCain?  Their comments over the last 24 hours certainly don't indicate that they are chastened by the humiliation they're trying to spin as victory. 

Meanwhile, the "supercommittee," led by Sen. Patti Murray and Rep. Paul Ryan, has two months to create an overarching budget compromise so that the governance by brinksmanship doesn't happen again in three months.   Already the Republicans have won some preliminary battles: the sequestration cuts are still in effect; the budget number in the CR is at the level the Republicans wanted.  Dealing with the fiscally ultra-conservative Ryan is already not going to be easy.  Even if the committee can accomplish something, it's an uphill battle to end the sequestration and to get the numbers back where the economy will actually be stimulated and jobs will be created.

Every nine years, director Richard Linklater has done a film about Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Céline (Julie Delpy):  Before Sunrise (1995), Before Sunset (2004), and this year Before Midnight, which I finally saw this weekend.  The trilogy (so far) traces the couple from their first accidental meeting on a train and the hours that followed to this film, which records their last night of a six-week holiday at the home of a famous British writer on the southern tip of the Peloponnese.  Jesse has a son from an extremely unhappy marriage who leaves to return to his mother in Chicago.  Together, Jesse and Céline have twin daughters.  The three films are about speech; nothing "happens" in the movies.  Rather, we listen to the two main characters (there is a scene in this film with the novelist host and some Greek guests, but it's just a brief interlude, and it too is all talk) as they express their thoughts from the most trivial to the most serious, though how seriously we take these latter observations is up to us.

The mood of this film is much less buoyant than the earlier two.  Indeed, for the first time, the endless talk becomes exhausting, though that feeling is intentional as Delpy's character particularly keeps circling back to the same themes.  How patient Jesse is to continue to listen and to try to please her.  Céline has coarsened in the nine years since we've seen last seen her.  Her body and her legs have thickened, and her attitude is heavier and less playful.  Jesse hasn't changed as much, and his worries, especially about his separation from his son, are more conventional.  He is now the stable one with glints of silliness still making him appealing--to us and to Céline.  It's Delpy's movie, for she provides the emotional swings to Jesse's ballast.  At the end, though Céline has tried to leave three times, she finally can't resist--for now at least--Jesse's winsome devotion.  Nine years from now, if there's a fourth installment, the characters will have just turned fifty.  All that's predictable is that they'll still be talking.

Meanwhile, James Franco has adapted William Faulkner's 1930 novel As I Lay Dying.  The novel is short by Faulkner standards, but it plays incessantly with point of view, as each section is a first-person narrative by one of the characters.  Some characters have many sections; Addie, the dead matriarch who is getting revenge on her husband by making the family carry her body through fire and flood to the town where she was born, has only one.  Midway through the novel, though she has been dead since the beginning, Addie speaks.  In addition to the playing with narrative, Faulkner also makes ample use of the grotesque: Vardaman, the youngest son, fearing his mother can't breathe in the coffin, drills air holes into it--and into his mother's face.  Another son breaks his leg as they transport the coffin, and they fix it by putting cement around it with nothing between the cement and the skin. 

Faulkner is, of course, notoriously difficult to try to film, and As I Lay Dying entails its share of complications.  The most ludicrous film version of a Faulkner novel is a 1959 version of one of Faulkner's greatest novels, The Sound and the Fury (Franco is also filming this) in which there is not one moment that isn't laughable and in perhaps revealing Hollywood fashion, the greediest and most self-centered character from the novel, Jason IV, is made the hero.  The only truly successful adaptation of a Faulkner novel, I think, is the Clarence Brown version of Intruder in the Dust (1949) with Juano Herdandez giving a great performance as the intractable Lucas Beauchamp.   Franco's As I Lay Dying has received mixed reviews, especially for his use of voice overs and split screens to approximate Faulkner's shifting points of view.  The cliché is that great novels rarely make good films.  The unity of form and content is too tight; the author's style and perspective are too distinct.  It doesn't sound as if Franco has given the lie to that analysis, but I'm looking forward to his attempt, which is clearly made out of love for Faulkner and his novel.

A few days ago, my friend TJ was tweeting song titles, altered by adding a word.  #addawordruinatitle   I thought literature might also benefit from the same treatment:

The Divine Situation Comedy
A Mid-Summer Night's Wet Dream
Anna Nicole Karenina
A View from the Dental Bridge
Angela's Cigarette Ashes
Long Day's Journey into Night Sweats
Lawrence of Saudi Arabia
Gravity's Reading Rainbow

And cheating a little bit:

Great ExpectORations
A Zero-Emissions Streetcar Named Desire

Contributions, anyone?

Mohamed is an economics major, and as I look uncomprehendingly at his texts and assignments, I'm struck by how much analysis depends on mathematical modeling.  This standard, traditional view relies on the theory of the rational man: the belief that in making economic decisions, people are basically rational and try to maximize gains and minimize losses.  Even if not everyone is completely rational, in the aggregate people are.  Recently, however, the model has been challenged by social economists, who argue that significant economic decisions are influenced by numerous non-logical factors and thus that no purely mathematical model will be indicative of how the economy will behave.

I first came across this new approach in Dan Ariely's book Predictably Irrational.  Ariely, an Israeli socio-economist, lists a variety of ways in which economic man is influenced by non-rational factors and gives case studies for each of his points.  It's clearly written and fascinating to read.  I borrowed one of Ariely's examples for use in my composition classes.  Although I think students write as well as they did 45 years ago when I started teaching (better even), one problem I encountered in the last years of teaching was increasing plagiarism.  With Internet resources so easily available, the temptation to "borrow" a paragraph (or more) here and there was just too strong for many students.  Of course, it was increasingly easy to find the plagiarism--no more going to the library and searching through books and articles.  I had students who left the URL on their paper, and many students who copied-and-pasted and didn't bother to change the font to match the rest of the essay.  My Ariely-inspired solution was to require that every essay, word processed as they were, concluded with a handwritten, signed, and dated statement that began, "I swear that . . ."  Rationally, one would think that if a student was willing to steal a paper, s/he wouldn't have any problems writing the statement.  Instead, the students simply couldn't sign their name to a lie, and plagiarism was reduced dramatically.  Irrational, but predictable.

Cass Sunnstein, a legal and political philosopher, has recently ventured into socio-economics.  His new book advocating what he calls "libertarian paternalism" is Simpler: The Future of Government.  But his previous book, Nudge, is the one that brought him to the attention of the general public, especially via numerous talk show appearances.  As a libertarian (an awfully slippery word), he disapproves of most government mandates and prohibitions.  As a paternalist, however, he believes that people often act irrationally and that the government's job is to provide 'nudges' to encourage more efficient behavior.  Perhaps the most important category of nudges is one which, while still allowing for freedom of choice, requires people to opt out of programs--health care, retirement plans--rather than to opt in.  Given the failure of most people either to have sufficient information or to process the information they do have (and the vast amounts of money spent by interest groups to make sure that it is their interests that are protected), inertia usually wins out and people don't take the initiative to opt out--indecision working toward their benefit.

The field of socio-economics hasn't worked its way into most curricula yet, and it doesn't have the scientific air of mathematical models, yet it seems to me a much more realistic view of human behavior than the traditional methods.  Attractive as nudges might be as a policy tactic, however, they don't really address, let alone tackle, the enormous systemic problems that are destroying the American middle class and further enriching the already enriched.

post script to yesterday's post

Yet another example of the depths to which the right will sink:  Stuart Varney on Fox was asked whether, once the shutdown is over, the 800,000 furloughed government workers should receive retroactive pay.  His answer was no; he ranted that they lived on our backs and made more ill-gotten money than most people in the private sector.  Is Varney really so delusional that he thinks that a park ranger makes more than he does?  Or in the world of Fox news is any fiction justified if it serves the narrative?  His final comment about the furloughed workers: "I want to punish them."

These people are like whack-a-moles.

Day four of the government shutdown, and the Tea Partiers can barely conceal their pleasure--or their hypocrisy.  Fox News has called it the government "slimdown" and prominent graphics read "The Obama Shutdown."  They repeat endlessly that no one is being seriously hurt--until they seized upon the closure of the World War II Memorial for a shameless appeal to "patriotism" as their signature cause.  Texas Rep. Neugebauer, flag pin in his lapel, large plastic flag protruding from his pocket, berated a young park ranger for not letting people in, telling her that she should be ashamed of herself.  She took his hypocritical abuse graciously, but once, smugly proud of himself, he turned around to leave, he was confronted by a more aggressive furloughed employee who didn't treat him with the respect Rep. Neubegauer expected.  (Does the Texas Congressional delegation have more assholes than is statistically probable?)

And speaking of respect, Indiana Rep. Marlin Stutzman announced that the Tea Partiers would not be disrespected.  They would hold out till they got what they wanted, though he didn't know what that was.

With its six Republicans in Congress, Kansas isn't spared the inanity.  Rep. Tim Huelskamp, trying to assure us that a shutdown wasn't a bad thing, said he didn't know anyone who was affected by the stalemate.  Given the bubble in which he lives, I'm not surprised that he doesn't know any of the nearly nine million women and children threatened with losing their WIC benefits--or the Head Start children who will lose their place.  But even he must know some of the 800,000 government employees who are on furlough from "non-essential" services like the CDC and FDA.

My tongue has several bite marks from not responding to the anodyne comment by a friend that she agreed with an editorial recommending compromise.  What does that even mean?  The 80 or so Republicans who are blocking the budget aren't going to consider compromise as they've made clear innumerable times on many battles.  The ACA was passed four years ago, and the final law was the result of many, many compromises on the President's side, far too many for those of us who favor a single-payer system.  And for the last four years, the hard-core conservatives have done nothing but hold their breaths until they get their way.  The act is in force, and it isn't going to be defunded.

My hope is that the Republicans are right about one thing: once an "entitlement" is in place, it's not going to be taken away.  The European, single-payer health care systems didn't spring full-blown into existence; they most often grew incrementally.  Parts of the ACA have been in effect for some time; the exchanges, despite the resistance in many states, went into effect at the beginning of this month.  The bureaucracy is in place.  And, no matter how much Republicans want to wish the law away, it's not going anywhere.

I read another hopeful editorial.  The author argued that the districts that have been gerrymandered to create safe, white, conservative districts encourage the representatives to take ever more extreme positions, farther and farther from mainstream America.  Eventually, he believes, these representatives, safe in their own districts, will become isolated from the rest of the voters, leading to the self-induced extinction of the wing nut faction of the Republican party. 

Before Dr. Van Veldhuizen prescribed yet another pill, this time a thyroid supplement, I had already been thinking about writing on the ambivalent feelings I (and I assume lots of people who take many medications) have with their pills--something like Patience/Patients and the Pill.  My routine looked like this: every morning 10 or 11 pills (there's one extra on Sundays), followed by an hour wait before I can eat anything and my daily shot in the stomach; two pills at lunch; four pills at 6:30; one last one before bed.  On the one hand, I trust that Dr. Van knows what he's doing, and certainly, given the initial prognosis, the pills are doing their job.  Still, there are mornings when I don't think I can face laying out the pills.  At this point, I hardly know or care which is which; I take them from the bottles in a certain, arbitrary order.  I take the biggest pill first, then the chemo, and then I just shove them in my mouth and gulp them down, two by two, with swallows of OJ.  And sometimes I just feel sheer frustration: what's wrong with my body anyway that it can't do its job and take care of itself on its own without needing calcium supplements, massive dosages of Vitamin D, extra iron.  And now a thyroid supplement.  Some mornings I want to skip the whole thing and just let my body have its will.  Patience and prudence (a good title for a British novel?) prevail.

The new pill has created a new schedule.  I have to take the thyroid medication first thing in the morning before I've eaten anything.  Now I have to wait an additional thirty minutes to an hour before taking any other meds or eating anything.  So this morning I waited 45 minutes and then laid out and gulped down the next ten pills.  Now I'm waiting an hour after the chemo before eating.  It's a pain.  In the meantime, Mohamed has given me my shot.  That's also a routine.  He tries to find a place on my middle that isn't too bruised or knotted, swabs it with alcohol, and says every morning, "This is going to hurt.  I'm sorry, sweetie."  Luckily, he does the injection smoothly and it almost never hurts.  I say, "Thank you, baby," and the day can begin.

Although everything went well at the consultation with Dr. Van on Friday, there was one exchange that was a bit disconcerting.  If I have a question or problem, I e-mail Dr. Van, and he always responds within 24 hours.  As I did with my students, I find this system a much more efficient method than playing phone tag, and I can cc Jennifer, the physician assistant, so she gets the info at the same time.  Dr. Van explains things thoroughly at consultations and will sometimes give his opinion twice--once to me and once to Mohamed.  But at the end of Friday's consultation, he said three separate times, "Now if anything happens or you have any problems, feel free to call me immediately.  You can e-mail but you can also call me directly."  Neither of us said anything at the time, but he was so insistent that in retrospect it sounded almost as if he expected something to happen.

All is going well, however.  I've taken all my pills, had my shot, and waited what  now is at least 90 minutes before the next step: eating breakfast.  Sounds good to me and my growling stomach.