Revolting

Get out of my Church, you revolting excuse for a man!

And take all your perverted cronies with you.

When is the “Me Too” movement going to happen in the Catholic Church? When??

Difficulties

So I’m finally getting over the bronchitis. It’s been nearly a month, and I can finally go as long as an hour without coughing. I’m getting a decent night’s sleep. I don’t feel like I’m camping out on death’s door.

Lessons learned? Plenty. First, if at all possible, stay away from doctors. They’ll kill you. By and large being a doctor is not much different than being a mechanic. Yeah, they have specialized knowledge. But your dis-ease is really just an educated guess to them. They look you over, they look the tests they’ve given you over, and then they say, “X.” And if X doesn’t work, they say “Y.” If not Y, then “Z.” Etc.

Second, trust your gut. The first doctor I saw, a woman young enough to be my daughter (and I’m not really that old), prescribed for me a course of action I knew to be wrong. But I deferred to the white lab coat. As a result, I think I suffered an extra three weeks. And I mean suffered – coughing so hard I felt I would vomit, long nights without sleep, difficulty breathing to the point where I actually walked extra horizontal distance at work to an elevator to avoid walking extra vertical distance.

Third, when symptoms occur, get medical treatment. Yeah, this seems to fly in the face of Lesson the First, but negotiating your health and dis-ease is really an art, not a science. I should’ve made an appointment with a trusted doctor (not show up without an appointment for a sick visit) and asked for antibiotics, the treatment that’s worked for me in the past.

But there have been other difficulties, too.

My three-year-old laptop has been acting up. So much so that I barely use it anymore; that’s why there hasn’t been any fresh posts here of late (the previous post was written and slapped on the blog via a library computer). The problem? The screen goes black seemingly at random. However, my buddy’s son, who has been trained to take apart and rebuild computers by his dad, thinks it’s a loose connection somewhere and offered to help. I’ll bring it over to him in the next couple of days, and get him a gift card if he fixes it. Right now I’m posting on it because I have it in a certain position at a certain angle and it’s working. If I move it ever so slightly, or bang just a tad too hard on the keyboard – fade to black.

Work has been insane, insane-r than usual. Missed a couple of days due to the bronchitis, which put me behind the 8-ball. Then only had one day to process payroll during the Fourth of July week, and did that in full bronchitic bloom. Had to manually update pay rates for 185 union employees when their contract got signed last-minute last week. Had to manually move PTO (Paid Time Off) accruals for 135 non-union employees to the PTOP (Paid Time Off Prior) accrual bucket, which gives them until September 30 to use any time off or lose it. We’re upgrading our timekeeping system, so I’ve been filling out a 33-page questionnaire for the new company, half of which I don’t understand and the other half I don’t know. Oh, and endless pointless meetings meetings meetings.

Home life is hectic too as every week – sometimes every other day – the girls are somewhere else requiring a change in my schedule. And half the time whatever they’re doing involves spending more money I don’t have. And the damn dog. Always gotta rush home to feed this dog I didn’t want and rush back to work because I’m a wage slave yoked to that damn clock on the wall.

I’d throw it all away in a heartbeat and become a Carthusian monk if I could, but I don’t think the Carthusians would take too kindly to family abandonment.

Anyway, more posts on the way, and not all will be complaint-laden whinefests.

Encounter with Liberal Insanity

Well, Hopper has had his first one-on-one encounter with the mental disorder known as Progressivism. Or liberal insanity. It’s the same thing.

I’ve been fighting this bronchitis for two weeks now. Fed up with the “stay the course” advice of my first doctor, I saw another one yesterday. He was concerned and ordered me an on-the-spot nebulizer treatment as well as some chest x-rays. While I was breathing in the albuterol in an effort to clear my lungs, the nurse came in with a form for me.

This nurse is actually an older Hispanic male. He’s assisted me before and he’s a great guy, though I still prefer dealing with the female nurses there. Anyway, he apologetically told me he had to ask me some questions.

“Do you adhere to the gender of your birth, on your birth certificate, or are you gender fluid?”

“Of course I do,” I said, indicating the first.

After marking my response on the form he followed up with, “and what is your birth gender?”

I raised my eyebrows in disbelief. In my sickness, with untrimmed beard and mustache, with great bags under my eyes from a dearth of sleep, I look somewhat like Jerry Garcia. But he had helped me and I didn’t want to give him a hard time, seeing he was embarrassed.

“Male, of course.”

A nervous chuckle and he made his notations.

“And what pronouns should I use when addressing you?”

Oh Lord. I thought instantly about saying “His Majesty.” A year or two back some young Republican in college tweaked his college professor by filling that answer out on one of those pronoun forms the idiots teaching our college kids these days seem enamored with. But I didn’t want to give him a hard time. “The normal ones,” I replied, and said no more.

So now I have had my first encounter with the Philosophy of the Denial of Reality that is swiftly overtaking academia and now the health care industry. How soon before I am required to take loyalty oaths to this viewpoint to maintain a job? I already have to take annual training where I affirm women make 77 cents on the dollar (debunked just about everywhere) and that LGBTQWXYZ is the summit of all that is good and wholesome (contrary to natural law and my deeply-held religious belief).

God help us.

And for those wondering, the new doctor prescribed me some antibiotics and steroids, which I took last night at 5 pm. I slept through the night (with only two small interruptions) for the first time since June 20 and feel a hundred percent better already.