Down, Not Out - And I Do Find a Doctor!

 Sorry, I have not been well.

I thought to catch up with my daily reports yesterday morning. Well, yesterday morning I woke with my right hand numb and my right shoulder hurting, coughing, and a little nauseous. For the first time, I called in sick. I walked around the room like Quasimodo without the hunchback. 

The cleaning crew came in, and I used up my energy in a walk to McClure's for supplies and then the office to pay rent. Returning, I found work had called checking up on me — surprising me they worried and scaring me thinking they had not got my message. Also, a call from the Open Door Clinic. I was back playing phone tag with medical care.

I have become convinced single payer makes sense. For the first time in my life I have health insurance (probably too late for any real good) but my first doctor gets dropped because the State of Indiana changed my insurance. That was late Spring. Since then every primary care MD assigned me by Anthem is not taking patients. So, I cannot get a doctor even though I have insurance. Now, I am not the brightest person in the world (anyone reading this blog in depth knows this all too well), so I like simple things — a doctor is either in or out of the network, and there is only one network. 

Waiting on hold is a good time for downloading music. I ravished Joan Jett.

 

I ate lentils for lunch. Not a bad job. Worried I ought not be seasoning what is supposed to be a fast. Even with hot sauce it is a reminder of what is being given up, which is I think the purpose of a spiritual exercise.

Some news came through the email, two more rejections. Passager rejected “Their Bright Future”, and Talon Review passed on “The Sloe Gin Effect”

Thank you for submitting your writing to Passager. We are sorry that your work was not selected for publication this year. This reading period we received thousands of pieces and we loved far more submissions than we are able to publish.

We want you to know that your piece came close to being chosen and we'd like you to try us again.

The editors must agree on all acceptances unanimously. Sometimes our decisions are based on how the issue is coming together, or what we published most recently, and not a reflection on the quality of your work.

Best of luck with your writing—we always hope you keep us in mind.

Sincerely,

Mary Azrael, Kendra Kopelke and Rosanne Singer

Passager Editors

***

Thank you for your submission to the Talon Review. Although we must decline your submission at this time, we greatly appreciate the chance to consider it. We wish you the best of luck in finding a home for this submission and we hope you will submit to us again in the future.

Thanks again for thinking of us and for giving us the opportunity to view your work.

Sincerely,

Natasha Kane

Editor in Chief

Talon Review

I decided if I had to wait for a return call from Open Door, and since I had not gone to the job paying the rent, then I had better get back to “The Dead and the Dying.”

That was what I did Thursday night, work on “The Dead and the Dying.” The meeting with the lawyer was unsatisfactory. My dissatisfaction continued through yesterday when nothing appeared in my email from him. All that bothered me Thursday afternoon/evening was the pain in my left hip, a headache, and my prose. My vanity would like me to think I know what I am doing with this writing thing, then I see passages that I should not have let go out into the public and typos that ought to have been caught. As I wrote KH last night, I do not understand why he thought I could write since I obviously do not understand how to handle my material. I finished stitching together my monster last night around 9:30. Except for talking to Open Door around 3 pm, eating dinner and another trip to McClure's for pop and cat food, that was my Friday night. You know what? I like this kind of life.

Yes, I have a doctor and an appointment for January. I think I will live until then.

A technical note, I am finding a limit on the spell/grammar checker for LibreOffice Write — it collapses when the word count gets over 50k. My solution is to run it through Google Docs. I do miss Word Perfect.

I experimented with lentils and mushrooms. I bought some bella mushrooms that were on sale. The idea is good, just more mushrooms. For dinner, I tried doing something I hated as a kid — stuffed peppers. Well, one stuffed pepper. The pepper was overcooked, but the idea works.

By the time I crashed last night, the only problem was a lingering pain in my right shoulder.

I did manage some reading — although Carlos Fuentes is being overlooked — and here are some of my notes for the past few days.

Discover the 3 Most Remote Spots in Indiana And How to Safely Get There

 These are 15 of Indiana’s Most Beautiful County Courthouses (I could quibble, but will not)

 Muncie mulls removing High Street Dam on White River

Madison County family seeking answers after 18-year-old died in jail 

 I found The Indiana Legal Archive while searching to for the Marshall Constitution, thinking to write on another item found (and which will appear as it own separate piece later this month): 

The Indiana Legal Archive (ILA) is a digital platform for exploring the state’s rich legal heritage. Through storytelling, visualization, primary source documents, and interactive media, the ILA seeks not only to educate and entertain, but also to engage readers in interpreting the story of Indiana legal history.

The ILA strives for historical accuracy and fairness in the representation of the past. If you see something that doesn't look right, please drop us a line.

***

The ILA is the creation of Ryan T. Schwier. After completing his B.A. in history and political science in 2001 at Indiana University Bloomington, Ryan pursued graduate studies at IU Indianapolis, earning a master of library science (M.L.S.) in 2004 and a master of arts (M.A.) in public history in 2011. He is a recent graduate of the Indiana University-Robert H. McKinney School of Law, where he served as Executive Editorial Director of the Indiana International and Comparative Law Review, Vol. XXV. He is the recipient of several accolades, including the Dan and Marilyn Quayle Scholarship (2012), the Robert H. Staton “Best Brief” Scholarship (2012), the Esther L. Kinsley Master’s Thesis Award (2011), and the Midwest Association of Graduate Schools Distinguished Thesis Award (2011).

It has articles ending in 2015.

I took at a look at The Ball State Daily Student, and found This can’t be the new normal:

Last Wednesday, the University Police Department (UPD) sent out a public safety advisory email announcing the arrest of two Ball State University students involved in a firearm discharge, which took place in Noyer Complex — a dorm that can house 800 students. One of the students involved, and later arrested, was treated for a non-life-threatening, accidental gunshot wound.

The gun from the incident and a secondary firearm were found in a dorm room in Woodworth Complex. The arrest, and advisory email, came two days after the incident. 

It took two days for us to know that a gun was fired in a dorm that houses up to 800 students.

This incident happened after the Sept. 16 report of a discharged firearm in Studebaker West. Through a public safety announcement, students were informed on the same day. It was concluded by UPD to not be an immediate threat.

----

If the people in charge of our safety wait over 24 hours to tell us what is going on in the place we live, work and go to school, how can we believe they’re prepared for something worse?

So how far does it have to go?

We hope speaking out on this issue will bring attention to concrete efforts to improve emergency communication methods.

Guns on our campus can’t be the new normal, but communicating about incidents at the moment they happen should be.

Yes, there have been guns at Ball State. It seems we are a country of fetishes.

I also found the student radio station: WCRD.

I read a long essay on nostalgia that I want to break out with its own entry here, it is a subject I am interested in and I think affects my own writing, but The Broken Chains Blog is a sideways nod to the idea. When in prison, I found we discussed long-lost franchise chains (I was surprised to find what chains had not made it east and what one had not gotten to Indiana). An example is You Don't Have to Call it Taco Tico. For some reason, I decided to google “Taco Tico” — there had been two in Anderson in the Seventies, a Taco Bell competitor.

And that brings me to the end of this post. About ninety minutes and a crashing Firefox have gone by.

I thought to close out with something new, I picked the following. Not versions heard around here, and a new one I feel is not heard around here.

 I heard him perform this on Philadelphia's WXPN, and thought he had a better voice than I recalled from his Boy George days. I guess it was there — you just had to get past the Boy George dressing up

Betty LaVette is just a wonder:

As is Sturgill Simpson:

This was playing on Real Player as I started to finish this post, so I decided to add it.

The bus comes at 8:45 and 9:45. I do not think I can get the first, so I will be taking the second. Payless definitely on the agenda, so is the bank to get cash, and, hopefully, Minnetrista for apples. I see working on this blog as today's project. Maybe I get back to “The Dead and the Dying” later on. I prefer leaving that to tomorrow after church.

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