Remember my post about the situation of men were introduced with the same level of detail as women? It would be a good twenty minutes before you got to his dog’s name. The problem is, NOVA is supposed to spotlight the scientific process, not the woman and her extended family. We already know they love her and support her, and how perfect she is.
But unless you tell me she is single and not busy this evening, don’t waste my time. It’s been a while since I watched a NOVA production more than a few minutes because of this. With a man, they tell you his name and get to what he discovered. Who cares if he was born in Minnesota. That’s his freaking problem. And no, Madame Curie did not discover radium. She isolated it. The scientific community already knew it was there. NOVA embellishes too much for my liking.
Being immobile gives me time to think, so look out below. I suppose if I’d had money, I would have spent my life chasing the next pretty woman, playing bass, and tinkering. Hey, it’s what I do now but not for my lifetime. I’ll say it again, I never set out to get rich, but to not waste my life at a cubicle or factory just to pay the bills and debt. In that I’ve succeeded. I do regret not getting a better education when younger but that had to do with money and bad family.
I was by far the poorest kid on campus. It is not with fondness I remember my first three years at university. As far as I know, and I was there, the next poorest kid, “Tex” got $50 per month from his mother, a widow on welfare. That’s $50 more than I got. You can tell me all the stories you want about kids working their way through university and such, because I was there and you are talking bullshit. University is not the local agricultural college, it is a society unto itself. Except for a few female foreign exchange students who didn’t need one, my dorm room had the only vacant parking spot on that vast corner of the university lands.
And I’m serious about that. I defy anyone to prove to me that wild tale of a kid working his way through university. College, maybe, but I doubt that, too. Oh, I’ve heard all the standard wild tales about the part time job and the summer mowing lawns. All of it, lies. Upon cross-examination of these liars, I have always been able to find the free ride within a few minutes, tops. Mark Holmes? He walked across the street to classes, never paying a penny in rent. Snake? Turns out his parents actually paid him to stay away from home and his “job” at as a teaching assistant was to meet girls. Warren did work his way through university—as assistant foreman at his father’s factory. What I’m saying is give me five minutes and I’ll find the lie. Nobody in the 60s or 70s really “worked their way through university”. Nobody.
For openers, it was financially impossible. To attend classes and study was a full-time job. Anybody who “worked” would have suffered instantly in those two areas. In the 70s, universities had their pick who they allowed in the door, so there were few part-time students—and even then, the degrees granted to evening people were different from the real thing. Don’t even get me started on how women graduated in those days. But to work one’s way through would have required such a phenomenal rate of income that anyone capable of it would not be wasting their time studying Babylonian architecture. Even the dorm drug pushers didn’t make the necessary money.
The closest I’ve seen was older male students returning for a second degree—but only after they landed successful jobs with their first degree and that’s the one I’m talking about. My own plan was to do just that. Get a throwaway degree that gained me enough money to become a doctor. The closest thing I know to a man who worked his way through school was my former partner, RofR. And even then, it took him until his mid-thirties and he had often to take an entire year off and work in a power plant.
He was banking two grand a month back in the 70s and he had to live a thousand miles in the bush, but he got exposure to something I could only dream of. He met countless skilled tradesmen who had worked overseas and told him exactly how to get the high paying jobs. By the time he was 26, an age when I didn’t even own a passport for lack of money to travel, he was making $150,000 a year in Saudi Arabia. (Grain of salt needed here. I simply didn’t travel any place that required a passport. Hawaii, Mexico, Barbados, back then a US driver’s license was good enough.)
ADDENDUM
A big day when you’ve only got one foot is getting to the bakery and to bingo. I shun painkillers because they mess with Mother Nature. The doc prescribed an anti-inflammatory and the condition is going away, should be gone by Monday at this rate. There, that’s enough whining for now. But being myself, I went and read up on gout. It’s like reading a psychology text and thinking, “That’s me!”.
As a matter of complete fact, I have all and not just some of the symptoms of gout and also have the exact lifestyle that wiki says leads to the condition, except one. No inflammation. I’ve gotten previous reminders that some of us are not built to last 90 years and I’m treating this episode as another one. The prescription just mentioned was for swelling and it drove my appetite wild. I’ve never been a picky eater. For that matter, I’ve always been a great sampler of most cuisine.
Back to gout, this condition worries me the more I read. I’m surprised I don’t have it. From the health food sites, I already include lemon, cider vinegar, and never eat beef. But heart medicine causes liver pain so what is to say it wouldn’t affect the other filtering organs, the kidneys? Are there any preventative measures I could take? Short of becoming a vegetarian, I mean. If gout is related to arthritis, that is one thing I do not want happening to my bass-playing hands.
For you budding med students, I’ll point out the pain was in two locations, just under my outer right ankle bone and in the fleshy part under the big toe. These are not classic gout locations but that was the natural first question every doctor and nurse asked. On the other side of the coin, the attack happened very quickly, the pain was severe, and as the swelling subsides, I see it is leaving behind a larger than normal big toe joint. It was muscle pain, bone pain. But I’ve been fooled before. Time to start being careful, I’d say.
