Commuterrant

The Lunch Truck - Only the Strong Survive

In an effort to strengthen my stomach before the family grand tour of China and Cambodia in July, I have been availing myself of the culinary delights offered by two lunch trucks near my office. They always have long lines (well at least one of them does), so I thought I should try it. They're convenient, they're cheap... why, they're ptoumaine-y good!

On day one, I purchased a fairly innocuous steamed chicken, noodle and broccoli dish, which was nice and simple. The second day, I decided to try something else. I can't for the life of me remember what it was, but I remember feeling only mildly queasy for the seven hours following lunch. On Wednesday, I decided to forsake my new favorite lunch truck and try the lunch truck next door. Both trucks serve Asian food, and both display health certificates, so I thought, "What could go wrong? I'm two-for-two!"

I chose a chicken-garlic-scallion combination. With the lunch truck, every day is like my birthday, as I bring the styrofoam container back to my office and have no idea what's in store when I open the lid. It's magical!

I opened the lid on this day and laid my eyes on the most horrific-looking pile of "chicken" I have ever seen. Said "chicken" was actually knobs of gristle and fat with minuscule amounts of dark meat. I moved the pile to the side so that I could enjoy the rice and the one piece of broccoli underneath. I considered eating the styrofoam container. After lunch, I had a rather uneasy feeling; what I imagine one might feel after accidentally eating a human foot.

Finally, on Friday it was back to the old, reliable lunch truck. I decided to order tofu with peanut sauce. After all, how can you screw up tofu?

I learned that you can screw up tofu... you can make it really mushy and wet, and then you can pour a gallon of peanut sauce that's the consistency of slightly warmed-up Skippy on it. Once again, I picked at the rice and ate the one piece of broccoli.

I think I am done with the lunch truck, as I believe my stomach can now survive anything. I now know that I can eat freely on our trip without worry, and will enjoy everything from street vendor meat-on-a-stick to live chickens.

Medical Vortex of Insanity

Lately, my brain has had some space to remember to do many forgotten things. Like get a mammogram, which I was supposed to do in October. My doctor’s office had told me I could simply call the radiology provider and make an appointment. I called the radiology office in April and they said, “We’re booking for August.” Since I had recently found a lump, and also had a change in my family history, I wanted an appointment sooner. I told them this. However, the lump is not a big concern, as I’ve had these before and they’re usually nothing. They said, “You need to call your doctor and get a prescription.”

I called my doctor and explained the situation. “Yes, we’ll fax them something,” they said.

I called the radiology office back later. “We don’t have anything from your doctor…” I was getting increasingly frustrated and decided to try the “remain silent” tactic. I said nothing.

“Oh wait; there’s something coming through the fax now.” She put me on hold, and came back 14 hours later. “Yes, we have the prescription. We can give you an appointment in August.”

“Wait,” I said. “I was told that before, and thought I could get something sooner if I got a prescription.”

“No, we’re booking for August.”

“So why did I have to call my doctor?”

“We’re booking for August.”

"What's your favorite color?"

"We're booking for August."

I explained that I had been getting regular mammograms for years, that I had found a lump and had had a change in family history.

“Did you tell your doctor you have a lump? It doesn’t say that on the prescription. Your doctor will want you to come in so she can see you first.”

It must have slipped my mind to mention the lump to the doctor’s office, as I was so caught up in detailing my frustrations. I called the doctor’s office back and provided scintillating details about the lump. They asked me to come in that day.

My doctor saw me, and wrote a new prescription for a mammogram and ultrasound. I went downstairs to the radiology office. The woman behind the counter looked at the prescription and said, “We’re booking for August.”

What?

I said, “I came in to see my doctor so I could get something sooner! Why did I come in for this?” Suddenly, fourteen employees and technicians converged upon the front desk, as if they knew I was coming, remembering the raving madwoman who had called that morning. “No, no…” they all chanted. “August, August…we’re booking for August.” I had just wasted three hours of my and my doctor’s time. Why hadn’t they just told me: “No matter what you do, you will not get an appointment before August. Do not bother getting a prescription. Do not bother coming in. We’re booking for August…”

I was almost in tears. One woman said, “Let me see if we can get you in sooner…my schedule is in the back.” I followed her and we looked at a different, more special schedule. She said, “I can see you June 1st.” Unfortunately, I’m starting a new job that week and cannot be taking off for doctor’s appointments. I started to feel like I was being difficult, and resigned myself to an August appointment. I explained the about the new job and said, “I’ll just come in August,” and she said, “But we wouldn’t want you to wait that long.” I left.

You wouldn’t want me to wait. You sure have a funny way of showing it. Early detection and regular self-exams are critical. Know your body. But don’t try to get an appointment for a mammogram within the next four months. You’re shit out of luck.

Will Commute for Blog, Part 2

I landed a new job, thank goodness. Even better, I will still have the pleasure of commuting to work - but no more Green Line! I'll be taking the Red Line, just five short stops to Kendall Square. I'm sure I'll still have plenty of T-insanity to blog about, although I will miss the particular brand of insanity that only the Green Line can offer.

Until May 30, I am considering myself retired, as I left the old job last Friday. Retirement is not all it's cracked up to be. I have started having conversations with the dog, and am spending way too much money.

Au Bon Come-On

One day last week, I went to Au Bon Pain with a couple of colleagues. It being a beautiful Spring day, I was wearing a bright orange shirt from the Gap, circa 2004.

While waiting for my sandwich, a woman behind me, also waiting, strolled to and fro while singing opera. And boy, was she was singing. Her voice, while subdued appropriately for a lunch hour sandwich pick-up, had this resonant, rich, professional-opera-singer tone. She was singing snippets of Verdi's greatest hits. In Au Bon Pain.

Suddenly and apropos of nothing, she said to me, "I love your shirt; it's so pretty. You look like sherbet."

While I appreciated the fact that she pronounced sherbet correctly, it frightened me to be compared to an icy, sweet desert treat by a total stranger, and one singing opera at that. If she had said, "your shirt looks like sherbet" vs. "you look like sherbet," that may have ameliorated my concerns. But her tone was frightening; she sounded hungry.

Preventing Plagiarism – A Novel Idea

Having spent years in the publishing industry, I’ve been following the recent controversy about the young Harvard author, Kaavya Viswantahan, and the discovery that she had inadvertently plagiarized internalized content from author Megan McCafferty, who wrote Sloppy Firsts and Second Helpings for her own first novel, How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life. 

Viswantahan garnered a huge amount of publicity due to her age and the fact that her publisher, Little, Brown, paid her gobs of money for the book.

We blame the author. We blame the publisher. We blame the book packager, 17^th Street Productions. But let’s stop looking at blame, and solve the problem! Here’s an idea – let’s let a big company with an already-existing huge presence online and lots of money scan all the books out there, index the content and make it freely searchable on the Web. Then, when a publishing house has a manuscript, they can pick a sampling of passages and run a search, to see if the verbiage has been previously published. And this whole mess can be avoided.

As an extremely profitable by-product of this effort, the publishers and owners of the scanned content can add links to purchase the book, either directly, or from booksellers, both chain stores and independent bookstores (the few that are left), based on the searcher’s ZIP code. Readers will be exposed to content they otherwise might not have found, and there will be a huge, new revenue stream for publishers!

Oh. Wait. Google has already tried to do that. And the publishers are suing them. Never mind.

Too Much Caffeine on the Green Line?

At Park Street this morning, I boarded a C train and sat down as commuters continued to pile on. A man wearing a black Guiness baseball cap came charging on, clearly intent on something. He shoved his way through the crowd and bolted toward an unassuming woman making her way to the back of the car. He proceeded to SMACK her on the back and yelled something along the lines of "Thanks for pushing me! You pushed me!"

She mumbled something about someone else having pushed her; her assailant, meanwhile, had turned around to head back toward the middle of the car.

He HIT her. No one else seemed to notice. Is this normal commuting behavior now? It's now okay to hit people if you perceive that they have wronged you on the T?

He spent the rest of the ride hanging on to a ceiling rail, jittery, bobbing up and down uncontrollably. Maybe he could have used a Guiness for breakfast.

Pink is the New Red White and Blue

Proud of my homegirl from Philly:

Watch the video.

Cruise, Holmes and Shields in Maternity Ward Mix-up

Yesterday, Katie Holmes gave birth to a baby girl, her daughter with Tom Cruise; the couple have named the child Suri. Ironically, Brooke Shields gave birth on the same day, to her second child with husband Chris Henchy, a daughter named Grier. But in a stunning development, the mothers were accidentally switched before leaving the hospital, sending Brooke Shields home with Tom Cruise.

This made for an awkward couple of days, since the two celebrities had a very public disagreement last year after Cruise criticized Shields' use of medication for post-partum depression. Shields documented her battle with depression after the birth of her daughter Rowan in her book Down Came the Rain: My Journey Through Post-Partum Depression, and came out swinging after Cruise's assertions.

Tom was so bowled over by the birth of his first mini-Scientologist that he failed to realize he went home with the wrong baby-mother. Meanwhile, Shields became so enraged by Cruise's "I have a baby!" furniture-jumping antics that she picked up the diminutive superstar and threw him out a third-floor window. She was not suffering from post-partum depression at the time. After her rescue from the Cruise mansion, she called the defenestration “the most sensible thing I've done since Suddenly Susan."

Counting Green Cars

For the second time in a week, as the Green Line train I was riding approached Arlington Street, an announcement came over the P.A.:
"Those of you in the third car, exit at the front of the car."

I ask you: how am I supposed to know if I am on the third car or not? My geospatial skills are not that refined, but it did become obvious when the train pulled into the station and I saw only the darkness of the tunnel outside the mid-car exit. It was then that I used my powers of deductive reasoning to determine that, indeed, I was on the dreaded third car.

Do people count the cars before boarding, in case of such situations? Being a Safety Girl, I understand counting the number of seat rows to determine how far you are from the exit row on an airplane, but now I'm expected to know which car I'm on when I ride the T? And how come the Green Line suddenly can't fit into the Arlington Street station? Did it gain weight?

And another thought: can't the MBTA be a little more user-focused in its communications? They always use T-centric lingo that only a seasoned MBTA employee would find meaningful.

I am reminded of the T-car doors that used to carry the message, "These doors do not recycle." That always befuddled me, as I took it as a warning not to use my brute strength to rip the door off of its hinges and tote it back home, where I could gently place it in my bright yellow recycle bin, thereby doing my part to save the planet. But they changed the signage to be a little more clear. I have to double-check this, but I believe they now say, "These doors do not re-open automatically," which is only slightly less vague. I think what they're trying to say is, "If you stick any appendage in these doors while they are closing, you will suffer death and/or dismemberment. You've been warned."

And the driver with the big-ass Green Line train that can't be accomodated by the Arlington Street platform? He should announce, "If the train stops and you see only darkness, you are still in the tunnel. Do not pry open the doors; do not get off of the train. Do not panic. These doors do not recycle. Whether you are on the first car, second car, or third car, it's no matter. Just walk to the front and exit there."

What the Pug Thinks of the Mom

The day that Stepdaughter the Younger came up with her artistic rendering of Hazel the Pug, she and I were spending quality time drawing together. I drew a few pictures of Hazel myself, and this is how Hazel responded:

She picked up her bone, came over to me and flopped her head down on the sketchbook, looking devastated. Was she trying to tell me something?