You sell them, I'll smoke 'em

Doesn't matter if I want 'em or not. It's called solidarity, and smokers seem uniformly despised, albeit their tax dollars are still welcome. Oh, and by the way? It's harder to kick a nicotine habit than heroin. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

Mayor Mike really went bonkers this time: Now he's Captain in Chief of his very own Police State, one of his making. As of last week, smoking -- not clearly defined as "no cigarettes, no pipes, no cigars, no drug paraphenalia" specifically, has been banned in New York City's parks, on our beaches, our boardwalks, and probably a thousand other places that my tax dollars support. So, along with knowing that the police here can essentially search you at any time you are on public property, i.e., bring a large tote bag on the subway, and you have lost the right to keep the contents private, remember that you've also lost a few Constitutional rights along the way.

For the civic-minded nicotine addict, it's the sidewalk, the middle of the road (so long as it hasn't been claimed for plaza space), or the parking lot as a choice of smoking venue -- 'cause if it's not the parking lot -- of which we have fewer and fewer now that real estate is so valuable you can build a glass box and convince people to spend $1 million-plus essentially to live in a glass house -- it's that or the middle of the road.

As for the parking lot, I don't own a car. Never have, and doubt I will. My carbon footprint is a size 6. So chances of my screwing up the environment with car emissions is very slim. Can you say the same? (Try to tell me that car emissions are good for you, and I will laugh you into the East River.)

So I'm basically headed to the parking lot to stay, because it's that or the middle of the road. And which would you prefer? Fatal car accidents -- for when woman meets speeding car, she loses -- or a slight willingness to concede some air space for those of us not using up any of our other pollution credits. Fortune 500 companies have been trading their pollution credits since the mid-1990s, so I see no reason not to apply that logic on a personal level.

You don't want me smoking in your office, well, I can live with that. You don't want me smoking in your home, well, if you can offer a nearby indoor venue, I can live with that. But the idea that you can't light up in Central Park is beyond me. This is, after all, the park where, in the 1970s, people smoked a lot more than cigarettes.

These days, it's hide and seek with a cigarette. I think people would prefer I brought a loaded gun to any nonsmoking venue than that I dare light a cigarette. This is, after all, still New York. You want clean air, move to Vermont.

Oh, and as for smokers creating high medical expenses? We all know we're dying one day or another -- unlike the anti/non-smokers, who seem to think this is a world without end. Ultimately we cost the country less in health costs than you might think, for the simple fact that a) we die sooner and b)what we have already kicked into Social Security will leave more for you. I'd like a little bit of gratitude for what I'm doing on that front.

You might also want to check the stats for how much money smokers cost in medical vs., say, obese people. One in five smokes, but one in three is obese, at least across middle America. And it is no fun sitting next to a person overflowing her seat in economy class on a plane.

What's next, a ban on sugar?

The girl in a bubble: white blood cells needed

Today my white blood count reached a new nadir: I have 400, practically few enough that someone could count them, and someone else could start singing 400 white blood cells in her bod, 400 white blood cells; take any down and pass them around, 399 white blood cells in her bod....

A normal reading is 4,800 to 10,000. So I don't exactly have any to spare. This week? Like the others, but more so. Every day, visit the doctor. Get blood pressure taken, temperature taken, finger pricked to put blood on a slide; get weighed; see blood test results before doctor hits the exam room and know: today, another 480cc shot of drug to hasten white blood cell formation.

Why so important? Chemo nukes out all the cells, the good and the bad. Then you have a hiatus, 2 weeks when the blood is supposed to regenerate. Thing is, every cycle of chemo makes it more difficult for the bone marrow to make the cells. But if I don't have a high enough count a week from now, then I can't get the chemo to nuke the cells that may exist.

Makes that much sense to me, too.

Then there are the red blood cells -- too few and you have no energy, not to mention having no immune system since the white cells are so few and far between. And let us not forget the platelet count. Normal? 130-400 of whatever unit is being counted. Me? Down to 55. You could definitely sing the bottles of beer song to that.

Platelets at this stage equal very limited blood clotting ability. A paper cut could send me to the hospital. This thought is not cheering. Neither is the idea that I have to be incredibly careful not to walk into anything, because I'd have a bruise for months.

People tell me, at least you still have your sense of humor. What else am I going to have? Shall we all start to sing the platelet count song? I don't have much in the way of intellectual thought processes to get in the way of a good old-fashioned sing-along.

Lymphoma? Not pretty. Can't dress it up and take it anywhere, not without sterile precautions. Time for another round of Purell, what I'm wearing instead of perfume this winter. I used to wear Joy. Even if I couldn't feel it, I could smell it. Now, it doesn't make a difference, except in the irony department -- but you knew I was good for that.

Hairless at home

No one signs up for chemotherapy with any kind of informed consent. Why? Info is given on a need-t0-know basis, while my 5 minutes on Google gave me the questions I needed to ask.

Sure, they tell you about losing your hair -- right on schedule, it came out in tufts. There was enough hair in my wastebasket to build a bird's nest. No one says, this process will take a week or more. You will shed. You will think you are molting. You will be surprised at what hairs remain and which ones detach with ease.

Then, you go to Wigville for the actual wig fitting. Explanations for taping wig to head prove more complicated than my brain can process. On my head, wig feels like an imposter's hair. Name for wig? Cousin It. No gender required. Cousin It's relative is "ittle," a band of hair that requires a cap over it so as not to expose the skull.

I'm told I have a lovely scalp. I'm told Cousin It looks real. Personally, I can't imagine that anyone could have any other response. Just as with new babies, all of them are cute, even the ugly ones. When you are hairless, compliments take on a different slant.

Nausea is commonly mentioned as a side effect, although the question is posed, "are you nauseous?" and proper English calls for, "are you nauseated?" P.S.: One day after chemo does not a clean couple of weeks create. You may not be nauseated the day of or during -- but there's a two-week interval to follow, when any day could be the bad day.

It is, basically, a crap shoot, how each person will react to toxic chemicals "infused" into her body. Your mileage, it seems, may vary. That covers a lot of reactions, but still, what you think when you start and what you conclude after four hours attached to a needle attached to tubing that glides the toxins into your body is unpredictable. Every day is a surprise: some are just days of slow movement; others are filled with queasy hours.

Things I researched; things no one would have otherwise mentioned: peripheral neuropathy, possible mouth sores and strange chemical tastes in mouth. Will chemo slow down the healing of the surgical scars? What foods may I and may I not consume? Do I need someone else to discern the temperature of my bathwater? How germ free do I need to make my house? Should I just shower in Purell and call it a day?

Do I need distilled water for ice cubes? How do I know good white cells from bad ones? In high school, we had to dissect a frog, twice. Why couldn't someone have taught me, say, some human anatomy? Something to do with how our bodies work? Surely we could have passed on the damn frog.

This is not the brave new world I envisioned. It is, however, very much in line with the title of poet M. Wyrebek's book: Be Properly Scared. I read the poems when they were published: the story of M's life from age 16 and her diagnosis onward. She was someone I admired -- talented, pretty, smart, funny -- and her life cut short as the bad cells multiplied and won the battle.

I guess I am lucky: the odds are in my favor. What the exact numbers are, I don't know. Another factoid hidden from the hairless. Chemo is not an adventure for those who need situations clearly delineated. Clues don't get spelled out; clues bite you on the ass, and assume you'll recognize them as answers.

But watch me when I do engage in commerce with clerks who are idiots: I have no time for them, not that I ever did have much patience. What I have now is an answer for, could you wait a few minutes? Not today, not this week. The toxins running through my veins have me in their grip. I am in thrall to what will one day be considered as suitable to cure cancer as mercury once was to cure syphilis.

I pull off my cotton cap, show my scalp, and say, "No. Don't have the time. And unless you have cancer, you won't, don't, can't understand me, so lay off the platitudes." It may seem cruel, but if there is one time in my life when it truly is all about me, this is it. Everyone I know who has been on this cruel dance floor has traced the same choreography.

Lymphoma focuses what is left of the mind in a position sharper than its ever been before. The rest of the brain cells are off on a sojourn somewhere I can't find them. I have to cling to the ones that remain.

Minus my thymus; au revoir Haiti

To recap: the thymus gland lies beneath the breastbone in the middle of one's chest. It is considered a lymph gland, not an endocrine one. Meaning, that, for a child and a teenager, this is the go-to spot for generating immune cells.

For the average adult, this gland is vestigial, about as useful as an appendix or tonsils. For me, however, the smoker's lung scan I had in Jan. 2007 -- which insurance/"medical benefits" didn't pay for -- gave a point of comparison with the CAT scan I had in September. Net result? Gland had doubled in size.

Getting to the CAT scan was easy: I went to Dr. Training Bra, aka Baby Doc, my 12-year-old insurance doctor ("in network") for a smoker's cough late last August. She took a chest X-ray and sent me for the CAT scan. And that was as far as she went.

Baby Doc, as you may have recently heard, since the Haiti I know and love was turned on its side last week, was a not-very-bright dictator who ruled that country during many of my years there. Like Training Bra, he was totally incompetent.

But Haiti was relatively calm, and open for business. Given the political structure, as long as you knew who to pay off, you were good to go. Since Baby Doc's forced (U.S. aided) departure in 1986, no one has known who is in charge for more than half a minute or so.

I'm afraid all the well-meaning aid in the world can't fix Haiti's problems. Rebuild? That would assume infrastructure that never existed in the first place.

Forget democracy: start with potable water, food, and shelter. I don't care who is running the show; I just care that the show runner is consistent. Although I'm hoping for a step up from Training Bra, whose consistent mien was inattentive, bordering on awful, and who demonstrated a less than active interest in me, the patient.

Kyona Beach, Haiti: the last place I saw my father alive, some 19 years and 14 days ago. Four days from now will mark 19 full years since my father died.

CAT scan results, September 8: lungs are clear, but thymus growth indicates I may have lymphoma. The word is on the table then, although no one allowed me to ask questions about it -- or, at least, no one would listen and answer me. What I picked up on is, the radiologists' report says, send her for a PET scan.

Thus Catch 22 begins: Insurance won't pay for PET scan unless I have a cancer diagnosis; PET scan is the test that shows the abnormal cell activity indicating cancer is present. Logic here? Not so much. And Training Bra did not, as I explicitly asked her to to, advocate for me to get the insurance company on board with the test.

So I exit the mismanaged nightmare system to return to The Good Doctor, the internist who won't take my insurance but who actually gives a shit about me and my health. TGD sends me to a pulmonologist.

Lung man compares the CAT scan film/disk with the previous smoker's scan. While he does think the gland has to be removed, lymphoma doesn't make it onto his list of concerns.

A few weeks later, I meet the surgeon. He's got the social skills of an 8th grade boy. I'm hoping that his handiwork is on a much higher level. His office, at least, gets the PET scan approved while I am waiting to schedule thymus removal surgery. Like the docs before him, he thinks this thymus thing will be nothing.

I wait seven weeks for the PET scan. December 2, Surgeon removes thymus -- not laparoscopically as advertised, but through a five-inch incision in the middle of my chest. It will be six to eight weeks before the bone knits back together. Meanwhile, I also have small slashes across the edge of one breast: the failed attempt at laparoscopy.

Surgeon thinks thymus will be nothing all the way until the pathology report comes back from the lab December 11. When I go for the post-op checkup, finally someone voices what amplifies the down-the-rabbit-hole feeling I've been experiencing for two-plus months.

Yes, it's lymphoma, Surgeon says, not in the least bit concerned as to what that will mean to me. Oh, and here's an oncologist in the next office. My work is done. Surgeon appears to have no emotion whatsoever about what the pathology tells us. He doesn't even say, I'm sorry.

Nor does he concede in the office that he thought the growth was benign, which is what he told my mom and one of The Three Sisters after finishing my surgery. Post-op, Surgeon doesn't seem the least bit empathic or sympathetic or to have any emotion whatsoever about what the pathology tells us. As my mom would say, "fuck him. Or rather, don't."

Surgeon has no answer for why the water in one of New York's better hospitals is not potable. Nor has he an answer for why the hospital was unable to supply one of my medications and I needed to bring it from home.

Nor does he check to see that the resident who let me go knew how to write a prescription: she wrote for ZERO pills. Were I not astute at proofreading, that would have been an ugly drugstore showdown.

Possibly the worse part of the do-it-yourself hospital experience was that if I hadn't learned to disconnect the monitor that measured the oxygen in my blood, I would have gotten even less sleep than I did. (The monitor, it seems, was not hooked up to the nursing station.)

In Haiti, I grew up brushing my teeth with an inch of bottled water in a glass. In what used to be called the Third World, that is par for the course. To find out that the hospital in upper Manhattan required the same course of action was a surprise. To me, if you can't drink the water, you damn well better have palm trees and a beach.

I return to TGD, diagnosis in hand. Within an hour she has found an oncologist who is well respected as a hematologist and he can see me the next day at 9:20 am. Not my time of day, she knows, but at this point, who cares.

Enter Dr. W., the recommended oncologist I like, in as much as I'm going to like one. I can't bear to go for another opinion; I have had doctors and tests filling my weeks since September.

So: I have non-Hodgkin's large diffuse B cell lymphoma. As cancers go, it is common as dirt, and it is one of the "good" cancers. Sure, like second place in the beauty contest in the yellow Community Chest cards.

What's good is, I'm at stage 2: very curable, with standard chemo protocol. I don't need the specialization of the cancer factory at Sloan Kettering. I can stay with Dr. W. and have my treatments in his office. I don't have to go to a hospital just to get the poisons that will save me "infused" into my body. Infused. One hell of a word choice, one of many in the new lexicon.

I feel like a Vietnamese town during the war: we must destroy the village in order to save it. Didn't make sense when I was 10; doesn't make any more sense now. But there's the metaphor and that is how it applies.

Thus far, I've had round one of chemo. So far, no major nausea or other side effects. However, the toxins have just started to work. I'm told by day 10 or 12, my hair will start to go. That hair I spent two years tending like the back 40.

Sure, it grows back: but still, the idea of lifting my hand to my head and hair just flying through my fingers is an experience I dread. And yes, I bought a wig -- from the store that refers to these items as "she" and "her."

Not having received the memo telling me that English has gendered nouns, I want to say, "IT. IT. IT. It is an object." But wigville is another stop I never anticipated. I am learning a new language every day, one that I hope you, any and all, will never need to learn.

It may help you to know that my mother, after hearing my diagnosis, brought over a box of chicken soup mix for me. She and kitchens are not on good terms, and the last time, probably the only time, she made chicken soup from scratch was the night my father had a fatal heart attack in 1991. Culinary expertise and my mom don't go hand in hand. For us, soup is black comedy, not cure-all.

Discussions in the chemo lounge are fragmented, scary: some tell their entire stories, from diagnosis into X number of rounds of treatment. Exact diagnoses are volunteered; it is rude to ask. Some in the room have no hair. Some may have wigs, though I am not yet expert at distinguishing them.

I know one thing: if you lose (not that misplaced is exactly the proper term here) your hair and get a wig, it must have bangs, because you no longer have a nature hairline. I have not had bangs since I was 6. Right now, I'm just hoping I won't look like a Hasidic woman who has shaved her hair for her husband.

My mom offered to shave her head in solidarity with me, and then to wear a wig. If she cannot go though treatments in my stead, she wants me to know how much she would if she could. I tear up every time I consider the offer, but I have pointed out, Mom, we're not those kind of Jews.

People say, at least you have your sense of humor. I wonder: without it, how would I survive? My illness is drenched in irony, and that is the costume in which I suspect I will navigate the next several months. It is the only one I know. Here's hoping it helps.

Hair story, part 2

Turns out I need the ponytail after all. My medical odyssey has just begun. I've fired the doc-in-a-box employed by mismanged nightmare, and found some M.D.s who are knowledgeable and care about patients. The prognosis is good, but I am tired. Right now, I'm going to take a nap, and this blog is going on hiatus. Wish me well.

Hair today, donate tomorrow

After 22 months, and countless brushing, combing, shampooing, conditioning of the hair flowing down my back, I am set to donate a 9-inch ponytail. It's made of my hair, for women who have cancer, and will be sent to Pantene for a program that makes wigs for cancer patients.

The ponytail, as requested, is properly tied, and resting in a Ziplock bag, waiting for me to mail it off. Given that my medical merry-go-round won't stop until after I have surgery next week, I'm waiting for the pathology report before mailing it off.

This way, I won't need it. Call me superstitious, but that's my nature: hedge your bets when you can, especially if irony is an overriding element in the entire event. Donating my hair is as close as I've come to volunteering a little part of me for someone else. Have I ever given blood?

Let's see: until I was 40+, I weighed under 100 pounds, and the minimum weight is 115. By the time I got to that weight, the chemicals in my blood alone would render it useless to anyone who wasn't prone to depression, migraines, anxiety, high cholesterol, and osteopenia. So there's not much call for that.

But the hair: it took on a life of its own as I tended it these past few months. It required lots and lots of maintenance, something I will not miss. Shorter hair is easier -- into the shower and out again, without a lengthy battle with knots and tangles.

This would be my pink ribbon, the real badge I've been wearing to honor my friend Dona. I think she would prefer it to my buying a pink bra for breast cancer month. Dona died at the end of October, 2007, and by January 2008, I had set out on my hair project.

Alice will be uploading photos to Facebook, that spot in the world where most of her friends live now -- before, during and after shots, carefully taken by one of The Three Sisters. That is, after her surgery.

Surgery is set for next week, and two of the three sisters have appointed themselves my health care advocate and brains. They have been to the surgeon with me, asked all the pertinent questions (they know this drill all too well), and will babysit my mom when I am on the table.

At this point, I don't want to know anymore about this surgery except that it will be over a week from now, and I will be in some drugged-up state at this time 7 days from now, and the drugs probably won't include nicotine.

That one, I will miss a lot. It's been my friend for a long time. Back when Dona was alive, we went to dinner in D.C., and I was amazed to find smoking sections in the restaurants, when Mayor Mike had scuttled that possibility in Wonderland. And she didn't care -- her cancer was her own, and that was plenty to contend with.

As for weed, Dona was all for it. Medicinal or not, that was, in part, how she got by. The rest of how she got by, mostly I don't know. What I do know is, I grew my hair in her memory, and soon, it will belong to someone else, someone I don't know.

I think of my donation as a gift more valuable than money -- I don't miss long hair; the ponytail is probably not an appropriate middle-age 'do, not that I have much to do with styling and shaping and applying product to keep hair from moving.

I am happy to retire the big hair clip, the only one that held all my hair in a bun all summer into fall. I am hoping someone will benefit from this tiny part of me, and that wherever Dona is, she will know I was thinking of her.

For Dona Marie Thomas Canales-Higgins

In memoriam: Dona Marie T. C-H March 2, 1991-October 31,2007

Ten things I know about Dona, who fought and bitched and sued and was ready to strangle the next pink-ribbon wearing woman. Ribbons don't cure cancer, and if you have it, do you really want a month of reminders commercialized everywhere? Dona didn't.

She had a neat one-page summary of all her chemo treatments, with a photograph of herself and all her relevant insurance info and contact names. Somewhere in my files, I have a copy.

In the end, none of it mattered: as of two years ago today, she is no longer with us. But this is what I know, or snippets from her lifespan.

1)she had blue contact lenses, to confuse people who wondered, how can a black woman have blue eyes?

2)she drove a Yugo, in the 1980s, and when she parked it, she put the club on her steering wheel.

3)she could have danced professionally

4)she taught me to dress better -- not to be so boring in the wardrobe department

5)she and I liked to make our college friends think we were lovers, just for the hell of it.

6)she liked her boyfriends to be other than traditionally handsome.

7)she loved her two children, Marcus and Thomas, more than anyone in the world. Thomas remembers her laughter; Marcus, her cough.

8)she and I spent hours at her uncle's house, watching the projection screen TV and frolicking around the pool

9)she bought me my first home pregnancy test, so I didn't have to

10)she was my dear friend, and I miss her.

Precertify this!

To: my so-called health plan

From: Alice

It has come to my attention that the word "insurance" does not appear anywhere near the word "health" anywhere in the opening pages of your 200-page book, the one you would prefer I not request as hard copy. "Curing the sick" is not even on your priority list.

Well, I read the damn thing, and the sum total is, if I am told I need a test more serious than blood, piss, a pap smear or a chest X-ray, my "health care provider" can neatly ignore what the radiologists, who specialize in reading films, have to say.

The buck did not stop at the doc-in-a-box office: she sent it flying off to the hands of the money-grubbers, those anonymous people whom I cannot telephone to argue for myself. My health is in their hands, whomever they may be, the "precertifiers."

If any of them has an M.D., I'm betting s/he works for the "insurance" company because no one would have him/her as a clinician or researcher. The guy who graduated last in his med school class, the one who is called M.D. nonetheless? That would be, should Cambridge (my nom de blog for the "health plan") actually employ someone with any medical training, the one who turns down my test.

This would be the idiot at the other end of the 800 line, paid to refuse to agree with the medical opinions offered by my first-line "health care providers." This leaves me either with large uncovered medical bills from the better doctors in this town, or it leave me being screwed, and possibly ill.

Notice the term "health care provider." Sounds like anyone from the clerk at the big-box drugstore chain to a kind stranger offering a Kleenex. Does not have that authoritative ring that an M.D. once implied. Apparently the health care (insurance?) provider has the last call.

Primary care means, I have discovered, if you can't diagnose based on years of experience, you will cover your ass by calling for expensive scary tests, then refuse to follow the advice of the radiologist, and blame it on my insurance. If you are a doctor employed by one of the mismanaged nightmare plans, you are not going to be my advocate.

An M.D. with experience and balls, however metaphorical, might fight for me to have what is deemed the next logical step in the flow chart per her outsourcing. But that's not how my health care plan works, and I'm betting yours is no better than mine.

Cambridge has decided it's not in the patient's (that would be me) best interest to follow through, on the grounds the next test is too expensive to bless. I wonder how the company will feel if, ultimately, I do get the damn test and it shows me lighting up like a Christmas tree. Will Cambridge then decide I don't need an oncologist?

That would be me, the patient, self-payer of $10,000 a year and rising for my health care. New discovery in the road to middle age: a "health care provider" is fine for, say, the chicken pox or the flu. If, however, you go in with a smoker's cough, you will find the PCP has never met a smoker in her practice.

Never heard of Nicotrol, the nicotine inhaler used to get smokers to stop and too scared to write the script on her own. Ever hear of a doctor NOT jump all over the smoker to help her stop? That's my "primary care provider." I should see a pulmonologist to confirm the need for medicinal nicotine.

Never mind that I control my own nicotine intake, and it's certainly got a lot more nasty chemicals in it than the prescription kind. Or that my lungs came out clear on the CAT scan. Where did the PCP get her M.D.? I'm afraid to ask. Her decision-making abilities, not to put too kind a description on them, suck.

When I asked her to act as my advocate, the go-between between Cambridge, which doesn't want to cover me when I may be sick, and her own medical opinion, she responded with a vote of no-confidence on pushing for what I need. I'm not sure she has her own opinions; her voice is never long on confidence.

Apparently it is my job to remind the doc that if she wants me to have a test, she may need to push for it with the precertification department. Not going to happen. Yea, that guy who was last in his class certainly knows more than someone who has seen the actual patient. Ha.

I doubt this doc-in-a-box would even prescribe an antibiotic for what could just as easily be bronchitis. And I don't need any degrees to know what bronchitis feels like.

But we are way beyond the chest X-ray. Went for the (preapproved) CAT scan, and independent radiologists offered up the PET scan as the next step in the testing process. Then Cambridge steps in, and says, not enough evidence.

Hmmm: I've seen the radiologist's report, and it is pretty damn clear what is supposed to follow.

Not from Cambridge, it's not. Who the hell makes the medical call of "sorry, too expensive. Wait until you feel like you're dying, and then we'll, say, send you to hospice"?

Who need a hospital when you can go straight from your own bed to the one that says, here's the last place you'll be on this earth? No, let's keep the costs down, and hope that one day, one of your Cambridge employees, needs this test. Then she will know how it feels, to be on the other end of test? You want a $5,200 test? Oh, no -- no precertification forthcoming. Not in the cards.

When the "health care" provider starts the bidding at four no-trump, the game is over before it begins. Cambridge has all the cards, and it specializes, it seems, in dealing its customers/consumers/suckers the hand without even one heart in it.

Our system is broken, clearly, but I don't have much faith in so-called reform, despite being a yellow-dog Democrat. Even with "insurance," we already have rationed health care, and I can't imagine the next round will cover my health needs any better than the crappy system in which I am enmeshed.

One of my closest friend's mother was diagnosed with lymphoma last week. This week, she's already gone for round one of chemo. She is 80, and recently she said, "old age is not for the faint-hearted." Her daughter, a veteran of the cancer wars, is a great advocate for her.

For the rest of us, however, her mom would say, 'It's a great life if you don't weaken."

Dancing in the streets

The news from home is grim on all fronts -- TBF (aka Clover´s Companion) is going back to the hospital for more surgery, and I am thousands of miles away, but in truth, there is nothing I can do for her in Wonderland, other than Be Properly Scared. I am. I am praying to a God about whose existence I am unsure.

Economic news grows more dire each time Alice signs on to Yahoo. Employment prospects look dim at best for the year. Alice has savings, but Alice, as observed last year, is still adjusting to reduced circumstances. (The exchange rate is so favorable in Argentina that it is cheaper for Alice here than in Wonderland.)

Nonetheless, in Buenos Aires, it is Carnaval, and the porteñonos are, as it happens, dancing in the streets. Wearing elaborate sequined costumes with make-up to match, they are celebrating. It is a joyous occasion here, and I am in need of joy. My flatmates I joined one group, made up of people ranging from toddlers to older men and women (not elderly: if you can dance in the street, elderly does not apply) fiercely contorting themselves in rhythm.

Never before have I literally danced in a city street. When Obama was elected, I wanted to dance in the West Village, but a local cop shushed us while we yelled from the concrete stoop, just as the cars were honking madly, before we could our feet could touch the asphalt. Here, we are welcome to dance in the street.

Buenos noches, Buenos Aires!

I am reliving student life, though in fact I never washed clothes by hand, never tried to iron, never washed a dish, and here I am, seriously lacking in domestic competence, and feeling ludicrously proud of my efforts. The apartment is run down, with a computer that runs Windows 98 and a telephone that requires a card for a local call, and my bed is definitely dormitory quality, if that. But what the hell -- my Spanish is improving, poco a poco, and for three weeks, I get to step outside myself.

The other students are young enough to be my children, if I had any, so I am gaining an interesting perspective on Youth.

Youth runs technological circles around me, though I suspect when I was their age and I lived abroad, I was more completely immersed in the culture around me simply because my time abroad predated the computer age. Cyber connections did not exist. We wrote letters, we sent postcards; occasionally my father sent Telexes from his office.

Daddy liked to know how his princess was managing. His princess was having a blast. Our business Telex name was hotdog, a play on my family name. My brother and I still have email addresses containing that name, to honor my father, who loved every new gadget that came along.


No one here can imagine a Telex, or a telegram. To me, the local internet cafe does seem part of the streetscape, but the cabinets where you can telephone the U.S. still seem a luxury, no matter how commonplace Youth might find them. Alice is a baby boomer, late to the global village. Youth is Gen Y or Z and knows of no other town.


Both Alice and flatmate Youth (a 19-year-old Dutch child-woman) think they are getting a great deal. Youth brings Alice coffee in bed. Alice pays for the taxi to school. Alice has been there, done that, and torn the T-shirt to rags on the rush-hour subway front, an overheated crowd new to flatmate Youth.

Other differences? Youth gets cramps; Alice wanted to sell her futures in Tampax on Ebay. Flatmate Youth instant messages; youth texts; youth emails, youth spends an inordinate amount of time facebooking (my verb of the day).

I, on the other hand, still find blogging a 21st century revelation, and if I want to talk to someone, I don´t want to sit at a keyboard and cripple myself. (Youth willl have to invent great voice-activated software. In 10 years, they won´t be able to type.) Call me old-fashioned, but call me. On the telephone.

Muchos gracias and hasta luego.

Alice, far from Wonderland

Alice va a Buenos Aires para aprender español

So far, that's about all of Alice's Spanish, but she's off to another hemisphere to wait out the freezes of February, keep her mind occupied and her skin warm, and reactivate her hiatus from responsibility.

January has been another month of travel and health crises: last month Brother had spinal cord surgery; this month, The Best Friend, aka Clover's Companion. Brother recovered quickly enough to return to Sleepy Southern State, where Alice went to celebrate her niece's second birthday.

However, back in Wonderland, Alice returned to find TBF still in serious condition, two weeks after her six hours under the knife. Alice trusts the visiting nurse, but the friend chosen to babysit TBF? Not so much.

Said babysitter's technological incompetence exceeds Alice's: yesterday Alice gave a magic show, what with turning on the cell phone and pushing the button to allow the thermometer to operate. Alice and TBF go back a long way, close to three decades on. If Alice were running the show, TBF would have a practical nurse from the time TBF's husband-the-doctor -- an actual practicing M.D.-- leaves the house until he returns.

When it comes to health care, Alice wants the pros. The cost is pretty much irrelevant. TBF is receiving all her nutrition from a feeding tube in her stomach. Fuck the friend/babysitter: TBF needs someone with real training. TBF is also attached to an antibiotic infusion, whose computer speeds the meds into her veins every four hours.

In another time, no M.D. would have dared consider her a home-care possibility. These days, it's let's cut, sew, and don't let the door hit you in the ass on your way out. If you can fog a mirror, apparently, you no longer qualify for a hospital bed, even if you have a staph infection that needs 24/7 antibiotics and you can't even swallow.

This is scary stuff: if Alice had her way, the amateur would have long since been dismissed, but she has no standing here, just her hopes and her prayers that husband-the-doctor (heretofore known as HTmD) takes damn good care of TBF, who is Alice's nearest and dearest.

Alice is equally powerless at home or 4000 miles away, and since TBF's babysitter is acting as guard dog, and HTmD is short on details, she has opted to leave town.

She is running for her life and praying for the life of TBF.

Eastern Standard Time: a brave new world

The sun set at 4;49 this afternoon, one day into spring forward, fall back, the changing of the clocks that I forget, season after season. This autumn, however, is different. Oh, we have fallen back -- in so many ways I don't care to enumerate them.

All I can do is hope that tomorrow, this country springs forward. Please, let the map turn blue. Let's have a president before midnight, the one, for once, whom I want.

It seems that recently, I can remember 40 years ago and my third-grade class better than I can what I told my best friend on the phone yesterday. As daylight shrinks, so, it seems, does my capacity to hold on to anything more than, say, the fact I am growing my hair to donate it in memory of Dona, my dear friend who died of cancer last Halloween.

Then, there are my menopausal marches, those hours in the park that I am free from computers, telephones, any form of electronic connection to the world. Mile after mile, all I have to do is put one foot in front of the other, check my pedometer for speed and my heart rate monitor to see if I'm in the right zone.

Sometimes I think I hit my zone in the last century. So much about me remains twentieth century, and damn proud of it. For example, I am not a willing member of the DIY economy. Specialization of labor had its good points, and with the computerization of the world, we appear to have lost it.

I particularly liked the part where human beings answered telephones and it wasn't considered outre to wish to receive physical bills in the mail. Then of course, there is the lost travel agent. I preferred it when I was not in charge of booking tickets, screening hotels from Web site descriptions, and guessing which company had the best tour guides. I liked a little knowledge from those who possessed it and were happy to share it for a fee.

But that was then and this is now: let's just hope that our brave new world brings us something genuinely for the better. If not, I fear we are, how to say it delicately? no, no way -- just about doomed.

Plan B for the middle class?

It's official: New York State has declared me a card-carrying, check-rebate-worthy member of the middle class, handing out what is called a "2008 Middle Class STAR rebate check." My rebate is based on various factors, and it is billed as a rebate "in addition to the amount of relief [ital mine] I receive under NYS's existing School Tax Relief Program (STAR).

I have mixed emotions regarding the "relief" I receive. On the one hand, I do not, nor do any of my friends, colleagues, or relatives, have any children in the New York City Public School System. On the other hand, our schools suck; they need all the funding they can get. These kids will need to work; someone has to pay into Social Security.

It is Halloween Eve, a night during which I do think of children. I think of why I will not be one of those apartment dwellers who opens her door to the building's trick-or-treaters. The last time I did, the children ran in a pack, grabbing for candy as if they hadn't seen food since their last Federally subsidized school lunch.

They barely said "trick or treat"; none stayed long enough for me to admire their costumes; and none said thank you. No one in this building, this bastion of the middle class, has a school lunch subsidized by anyone other than a parent. A parent who, as far as I can see, appears not to have taught his/her kids any manners.

(This may not be the first Halloween I have ranted about the neighbors' children.) But if these children are our future, my late poet-friend's book title remains apropos: Be Properly Scared.

I do remember watching my cousins' children in Maine, seeing the inability of a sixth grade teacher to catch a major grammar error in the first sentence of one child's essay. In Massachusetts, my assigned role is to distinguish between less and fewer, to tackle proper use of prepositions and verb tenses, as well as assert the importance of asking "may I," not "can I."

Granted, I am one of the few remaining grammar Nazis, but I maintain that it is much easier to communicate when everyone can speak the same language, and can create subjects that match their predicates. I am not sure about the future, in the land of what can kindly be called the short-attention-span.

Life is not a video game, contrary to what computers and game boys may try to teach. For one thing, you can't always shoot the bad guy; sometimes, it's simply not an option, and besides, the bad guy is difficult to identify. For another, practice will not get you to Carnegie Hall. Practice will screw up the joints in your fingers to the point that when you are old enough to buy a drink, you will lack the ability to hold the glass.

Where I'm coming from today is my gut feeling that Plan A for the middle class, that economic merry-go-round we all thought would never stop, has thrown all its riders to the ground. It's not working. We need to go to Plan B -- but first, we need to figure out what it is.

No matte what happens next Tuesday (and I've been ready to cast my vote for at least a month), I don't think Plan B will materialize at any time soon. Government simply isn't cut out to work that way.

As my friend winding up 30 years at the FBI says, "we bring you yesterday's technology tomorrow." I assume that means that government does do Windows, but it probably doesn't do VISTA, much less anything to do with a Mac.

Obviously, at this moment, I don't think the proverbial glass is half full. I'm not sure I think it is even half empty. It seems more likely that as we wait for Plan B (the one in which politicians and finance people admit the economy has tanked, not that the economic outlook has been reduced, or diminished, or whatever euphemism they choose), that the glass is cracked.

All I can do is hope someone has some Crazy-Glue in his or her back pocket. Cause that's what we need to hold a Plan B together. Otherwise, well, let's not go to otherwise just now. Tomorrow is, after all, another day.

Viewer discretion is advised

Why this disclaimer doesn't run prior to every newscast, atop every newspaper, as a pop-up ad before every Website hit, I don't know. Seems to me there is a lot in this world the viewer would be advised to think twice before taking it in.

Life is beyond see-no-evil, hear-no-evil, touch-no-evil, taste-no-evil, feel-no-evil: evil has, in various guises, become unavoidable. Here in Wonderland, we're into our sixth day of a so-called heat advisory. (Touch- and feel-no-evil the primary principles involved, with see-no and hear-no a close second if the TV set is nearby.)

Translation: 90+ degrees before noon, humidity to make a person wilt. Con Ed wants us to conserve energy. Forget kilowatts: the energy I'm conserving is my own. I'm following what the signs in on the lawns at Central Park suggest: passive activities encouraged.

For our continued enjoyment of the park, the sign-makers suggest we not wear it out. They are trying to keep the grass from getting flattened from too much use, an odd idea for a park, you might think. Still, it is Wonderland, and the park rules reflect our lives, the truth of living among so many people in such a densely populated area.

The private sector has pumped a ton of money into our park in the past ten years; we finally have lawns where once there was just mud; and no one wants us -- the public -- to trash the efforts of those with another kind of green.

When I set out on my menopausal marches, otherwise known as my hour-long, 3.75-mile speed walks on the bridle path around around the reservoir, I do stick to the trails. The bridle path has become a misnomer: Central Park is now bereft of horses. Dressed for walking, I wear more metal than the average equine. A friend has me wired for everything but sound.

I strap on a heart monitor, wetting the two leads before hooking them to the actual metering device; I turn on the pedometer strapped to my sneaker (running shoe, to be precise); and I press "start" on the watch that keeps track of it all: heart rate, distance, speed, time elapsed, calories burned.

The sheer computing power of the device attached to my wrist exceeds that of my Kaypro II X, the computer I owned in 1985, a "portable" machine lovingly known as Darth Vader's lunch box, all 26 pounds of it.

Funny thing is, apart from the Internet, I'm not sure I can do much more with the computer I own generations (and several operating systems) later. I did not sign up for technological advances at the speed of light, and at this point, my brain remains one formed by the last century. The computer has vast capabilities of which I remain unaware. I work on a need-to-know basis.

This century requires more viewer discretion than the last: the economy is crashing and burning, and my former industry, editing magazines and newspapers, has gone to the dogs. Copy editing is being outsourced to India. Want to buy a house, cheap?

Friends tell me paralegal tasks are performed at cut-rate prices next to the copy editing; we know any kind of computer "technical assistance" has long ago left these shores. What remains for us, as even our intellectual capital is offered offshore to the lowest bidder?

Clearly I have chosen the wrong vocations: I should have learned electrical, or plumbing, or how to run a boiler, fix the air conditioning, tile a bathroom, any form of construction -- tasks that cannot be shipped offshore, many of which are unionized.

One of these days our local news will come from China, where it is clearly cheaper to produce. The fact that none of the reporters will know uptown from downtown will no longer be relevant. More evil here I wish not to see.

Rumor (or the government) has it that we are exporting far more than we are importing, due to the weak dollar. What I want to know is, what do we have left to export? I didn't know we had any manufacturing plants remaining, especially after my tour of Lowell, MA last week.

Lowell, once the site of America's first textile mills -- many of which were water-powered, in those pre-oil-dependent days -- have long since been shuttered. Downtown is the nation's first urban national park. The area feels like an actual city, except that the streets are empty, as if someone built a city but forgot to drop in the people.

Our political landscape makes me wince: why is anyone surprised that Obama turned out to be, horror of horrors, a real politician? I'm a yellow-dog Democrat; of course he has my vote. But I don't expect him to change the world. Camelot, after all, wasn't all it was cracked up to be.

The late M. Wyrebeck wrote: "Be properly scared." I am.