Practicing To Be a Practicing Physician, and Watching Vintage Judge Alex Cases on YouTube

For anyone who doesn't know and actually cares, I'm technically in school -- medical school, to be more precise -- but I'm beyond the classroom phase of my education other than the occasional seminar, which even licensed physicians are required to sit through on occasion.  My education now consists of on-the-job training with close supervision and a liberal amount of critiquing.  I actually perform some patient procedures, but I don't have the power to determine any treatment or course of action for a patient. I have to go through all the motions as though I'm qualified to make those life-or-death decisions, but in the end, someone smarter and more powerful than I is there to confirm or to overrule any decision I make.  Even though I'm mere months away from graduation, I have no more power than I had a year ago because each clerkship rotation is in a different area of medicine, and each one is new to me. 

The nice thing about my current rotation -- radiology --  is that much of the work is done behind the scenes. If I make an incredibly stupid error, I'm corrected in relative privacy rather than right in front of a patient and his or her relatives. I don't make tons of incredibly stupid errors, but the possibility of my doing so does exist. It's much less stressful to know that, should my diagnosis be laughably off the mark, the audience of witnesses will be very small.  It is a consolation, however minuscule. This year, for the most part I have only to worry about making a fool of myself, though there are exceptions.  The stakes, however,  will be higher next year, and even more so the following year, when I'll be  in the actual position of potentially killing someone with my screw-ups.  Even this year there's the possibility of doing considerable damage if I bungle a procedure, but the program does everything it possibly can to provide a safety net. They do this for the good of the patients and not for the preservation of my honor and peace of mind. Where my fellow med students and I are concerned, if the system could give us more responsibility with less support, they would do so, as we would learn more quickly (and the hospitals would get more free labor), but patient well-being has to come first.

Teaching hospitals face a difficult balancing act. Prospective physicians have to learn to perform the procedures they will need to perform once they are licensed. A medical school or hospital cannot simply wait until a physician is licensed, then expect him or her to know how do do all the things he or she will need to be able to do without any actual hands-on experience. They do what they can to give us simulated practice. We performed our first incisions on cadavers. We do computer simulations. We also have access to remarkably life-like dummies that give us the opportunity to perform many invasive procedures on them before we get our hands on their genuine living and breathing counterparts. 

At some point, however, all of us have to take the plunge and perform procedures of all sorts on live humans. It's frightening for us, and it would really be frightening for them if they knew it was our first time at the procedure, but of course they never know that. Sometimes they don't even know it's the student who is performing the procedure. I certainly wouldn't want to know if I were they. 

The first time I did a lumbar puncture, I very nearly passed out. I had to stop right after the initial puncture. A nurse held the needle in place; the supervising physician would have taken over if necessary for patient safety, but she chose to treat the situation as if it would have been treated had I been the actual physician and not merely a student, so she allowed the nurse to hold the needle for the fifteen seconds or so that it to me to stabilize myself. I sat and put my head down until the light-headedness left me, then continued without a hitch. 

I don't think anyone would argue with the idea that it is at patient expense that medical students master the procedures that comprise their jobs, but if we didn't learn them, everyone would suffer. We at least have the benefit of the dummies for practice. A couple of generations ago, once everything that could be done on a cadaver had been done, it was on to real live patients with no in- between. One couldn't have paid me enough to be a patient in a teaching hospital back in the day. It's treacherous enough now.

After a long week (I was officially on duty for eighty-two hours in the hospital this week; I was physically present for considerably more hours), I needed a diversion. For that diversion, I went to YouTube and found a few vintage Judge Alex cases. Those old classic episodes were the perfect venue for unwinding after a difficult work week. One case in particular -- Bidwell versus Hale -- was quite a hoot. Megan Bidwell, a lesbian (not that there is anything wrong with being a lesbian; it's merely worth noting that an avowed lesbian would unintentionally conceive a love child after the personal and public confirmation of coming out. Her reason for it was that she was drunk; it would take a whole lot more than mere alcohol to compel me to do anything that could possibly lead to the conception of a baby with Mr. Hale, and I'm heterosexual), was suing the father of her child, David Hale, over charges made on a joint credit card. The case would have been mundane to the point of boredom were it not for the litigants and their companions (with the exception of the plaintiff's companion, Kathryn Moore, who appeared normal as far as I could tell and was smart enough to say essentially nothing), who looked to me like haphazardly constructed puppets. When they spoke, they gave me the strong impression (which I really hope was a false impression) that they were the products of consanguineous relationships. I'm speaking of serious dueling banjos here. Again, because I do not wish to be sued, I must clarify that this is nothing more than an impression I had. I have no evidence whatsoever to support the proposition that any of the people featured in this case were the products of brother-sister or even aunt-nephew relationships. They merely appeared to be such.

Ms. Bidwell described for the audience and for all of us in TV Land how she made it to her child's gestational age of twenty-three weeks without knowing she was pregnant. This is far from any sort of record; you may have caught an episode or two of TLC's I Didn't Know I Was Pregnant, where women show up in emergency rooms with acute abdominal distress, only to be told that they're in labor.  Perhaps I should be less judgmental, but I don't quite understand how any sound-of-mind woman with cognitive function approaching the normal range could make it much past the first trimester of pregnancy without harboring at least a suspicion that she might possibly be, as the French would put it,  enceinte.  Ms. Bidwell next complained that, upon discerning an "awkward feeling in [her] belly" that he (it's not entirely clear, but I assumed the male pronoun was in reference to Mr. Hale) wouldn't "take me to any doctor or anything to find out if I was pregnant." Why would she have needed someone else to take her to a doctor to find out if she was pregnant? Did she lack the capability to seek medical care for herself? And while I'm the one of the last people who would disesteem the importance of medical care by professionals, home pregnancy tests are available at almost every pharmacy or supermarket. The bottom line for me is that if I were incapable of acquiring medical care without the assistance of such a a numbskull as David Hale, I would give up and consider myself as good as dead at the first sign of a medical emergency.

Megan Bidwell and her comparatively normal-appearing significant other, Kathryn Moore

Defendant David Hale spoke with an impediment I have no idea how to describe. Judge Alex made reference early in the episode to dental work Hale had done recently as being the alleged cause of his speech anomaly. I obviously have no idea what was done to the defendant's mouth or what he sounded like before the dental procedure.  Dental work notwithstanding, he's an odd duck, though not nearly so odd as was and presumably still is his wife/witness.  She was easily the most bizarre character featured on that particular day, and would quite possibly find a place in Judge Alex's Top Ten Most Idiosyncratic Litigants if such a list were to be compiled. She reminded me very much -- in speech and mannerisms --  of some of my cousins' cousins' cousins in Oklahoma, minus the heavy Oklahoma drawl.

David Hale and his bride and would-be P.I., Angela Brown

At some point during the case, when David Hale's bride of one month, Angela Brown (whose boobs appeared to droop at least three-quarters of the way to Antarctica; I'm not meaning to be catty in saying this, because she at least has boobs, but in all sincerity, I don't know if she went bra-less in attempt to seduce Judge Alex, or if she was wearing a bra, yet gravity still had such a potent impact on her anatomy), was telling a rather convoluted story of how she had attempted to conduct her own investigation of her then-future husband by contacting Ms. Bidwell through Facebook, bailiff Mason Burroughs failed to contain his laughter. He turned his back to the litigants and to the gallery of the courtroom as he wiped his eyes and at one point snorted. Judge Alex eventually lost composure as well. The audience laughed throughout the entire fiasco. Then the litigants and witnesses began to laugh. I had the strongest of urges to walk through my television screen to tell the litigants and witnesses, "They're not laughing WITH you, morons [and morons may very well have been a literal if not euphemistic term of address for the individuals featured in this case]. They're laughing AT you. There IS a difference." 

I suspect one of the reasons Mason laughed so boisterously was because white people on the program made more thorough fools of themselves than had any of the black litigants. I wouldn't accuse black people in general of behaving any more outlandishly than white people do. In real life, uncivilized behavior is something on which no single ethnic group holds anything resembling a monopoly. On TV court shows, however, the producers somehow find more people of African-American ethnicity that they are able to persuade [with money or with whatever it is that producers of court TV shows use to entice people to appear on their programs] to air their grievances in ways more emotive and flamboyant than are typical of the Caucasian litigants. This case, however, belied that entire premise.

In attempting to check these people out,  I googled their names. Ms. Bidwell was charged with assault and battery in May of 2017. Her mugshot was reprinted in a Virginia publication entitled Gotcha!. Gotcha! is a weekly periodical from Richmond, Virginia, which is comprised solely  [except for the obligatory advertisements; God alone knows who or what would choose to advertise in such a rag] of mugshots. How does such a publication have a large enough circulation to be sufficiently profitable to remain in print? Seriously, who buys this shit? I might possibly purchase a single issue if someone I knew was included in it, though I certainly wouldn't subscribe. Maybe that's the point. Perhaps many of the residents of western Virginia know so very many people who are arrested that to them, reading Gotcha! is like thumbing through a high school yearbook or family photo album. Perhaps it's the closest thing to a high school yearbook or family photo album that some of the readers will ever own.

Megan Bidwell's mugshot (photo credit - Gotcha!)

Here is a link to the episode for your viewing pleasure.

6 lbs., 1 oz. and 27.5 Inches in Length

This is how the cello was displayed in the store. It's a Maple Leaf make of cello. Get it? Cute, huh? As soon as I paid my money I disposed of the damn leaf.

Don't worry that the kid is unnaturally thin. It's a cello.

Today I dealt with the recent demise of a relationship by undergoing a bit of therapy. To be more specific, it was therapy of the retail variety.  I took money that had been removed from my bank account months ago for the purchase of a new violin and bought a cello with it. It was not needed for my new violin because my uncle decided a few months ago to buy for me the violin of my choice after my mom damaged my previous violin. I won't even address the sketchiest details of that fiasco.

I was actually doing myself a major favor by spending the money, as it had been sitting - nicely camouflaged -- at the bottom of a decorative jar, beneath a cluster of glass jelly beans. We all know that it's not terribly prudent to keep a large cache of money stored underneath a mattress or, for that matter, anywhere else in one's home. I've been too busy even to visit a branch of my bank during business hours, and I felt even more nervous about going out with such a large amount of cash after-hours to deposit it into an ATM. That's what I'm telling myself, anyway, about why it was such a great idea to drop the better part of  six thousand dollars on a cello, a decent bow, and a sturdy case. 

My brother casually mentioned what I was doing today to my mom in a text. My mother quite predictably went ballistic. Her stated reasons as to why my indulgence was such an abysmal practice centralized upon the premise that what I did was to sublimate my emotions, not actually dealing with them, but rather,  engaging in the most unhealthy practice of compulsively dropping a large wad of cash on an impulse purchase. She said it wasn't really about the money.

I shall share my opinion here even if no one desires to hear it because this is my blog and I can say whatever I want as long as it's not libelous. Almost anytime someone gives you the line, "It's not about the money," it really is all about the money. My mother is upset that I spent nearly six grand on a cello and related paraphernalia.  If I had gone out and wasted three hundred dollars on high-end cosmetics, she probably would have considered the practice not conducive to mental health, but she wouldn't have given a rat's rectum [shoutout to Knotty] that I had done it.

Before you find yourself too firmly entrenched on her side in this dispute, let me relate just a bit of my mother's retail history. When she was fourteen and a high school junior she purchased a new Trans Am with earnings from a gambling ring that she operated in her high school. She was still almost two years from being able to drive legally when she bought the Trans Am. (I'm not suggesting my mother let the car vegetate in the garage for almost two years. According to her siblings, she drove herself even to eighth grade in a second-hand Mustang she bought years earlier, also with gambling ring earnings. I'm just saying it wasn't legal for her to have driven the car.) One or the other of her parents must have signed for the car, but she would have been the one to fork over all the cash at the age of fourteen. I drive a freaking Honda Civic at the age of twenty. For the record, I consider myself quite fortunate to have the Honda Civic, as not everyone can have Judge Alex, who buys Lexuses for his offspring, as a father. I'm merely mentioning this to give you, the reader, much needed perspective in regard to my family's financial history.

Moving along to my mother's more recent history, she has not one, not two, but three grand pianos in her present home -- one for each floor of the house. The pianos are two Steinways and a Kawai, for the record -- which are not exactly Wurlitzers in the grand scheme of all things piano-related. That doesn't even count the baby grand that is in my room there and was purchased for me by my Godparents. My mother also purchased a 6'4" ebony Boston [a Steinway subsidiary] grand for the condo. My mother's net worth in pianos alone is equal to or greater than the combined wealth of the average two-income family in the U.S. Isn't that just really sweet as well as sensible? Is it normal to be too damned lazy to descend a flight of stairs to play a piano?

I'm not suggesting that my mother has spent money foolishly on a regular basis throughout her marriage. She herself has worked at decent-paying positions for all but a few years of her marriage, and what she spent on pianos probably didn't even touch my father's salary, the magnitude of which I don't know, though I'd have to guess that what he pulls in is substantial. What I am suggesting is that my mother is the proverbial pot calling the proverbial kettle proverbially black by complaining about my recent indulgence. My not-quite-six-thousand dollar purchase pales in comparison to the money she's spent in an arguably frivolous manner.

All sales of used merchandise at the store from which I purchased the cello are final. I've watched enough of courtroom TV shows to know that the only terms under which my purchase could be invalidated would be if the cello, bow, or case  had been in some way falsely represented. I did my homework. My cello is the real deal. The cello is here to stay. 

My mother needs to learn to look on the bright side. This figurative coin of sorts actually has two bright sides. Side A: I would have spent even more on the cello except that a high-end cello, while it sounds great when played by an experienced and talented cellist, is actually more difficult to play than is a bargain basement cello. I split the difference and went with a mid-level model. Side B: Even if I have a bona fide musical instrument addiction -- which I do not -- it's far cheaper than a drug or gambling habit even without the necessity of paying for related stints in rehab.

The song of the day for today should be a cello song except that I cannot actually play the cello yet, so instead, we will go with Gloria Gaynor's breakup anthem of the 70's or 80's or whenever it was recorded.

Separated at birth???

Has anyone other than I noticed  the at least slight resemblance between Brody Jenner and serial killer Cary Stayner? I'll post a link to Stayner's story below, as there are now  officially too many mass murderers for everyone to keep track of them all. I've had  more than a passing interest in the Stayner case because one of my aunts is marginally acquainted with the Stayner family and because my family  vacationed in Yosemite that year, thoroughly traumatizing me,  and because it all went down not that far from my neck of the woods at the time.

I say this at the risk of  publicly raising my personal morbidity index from marginal to fully gruesome,  but I actually believe Stayner is the better looking of the two men in this specific head-to-head comparison. This is  particularly salient when one considers that Jenner's picture is probably some sort of photo op set-up,   and more likely than not he spent ten to fifteen minutes in a cosmetician's chair  having his mug made maximally attractive,  versus Stayner's  literal mug shot, before which  Stayner, in all likelihood,  was given neither the time  nor a washcloth or a comb with which to tidy himself up prior to the photo op.

When I have a bit more time, I'll share my own saga in relation to true crime  and the killings that caused me to need a night light in order to sleep most nights to this very night.  For now, however, please simply  note the resemblance, real or imagined  on my part,   and wonder, as do I, just how it is that a man who had been living practically under a rock in order to evade law enforcement officials can emerge from beneath said rock, have his picture snapped, and come out of the photography session looking even in the ballpark of  comparability to a Jenner / Kardashian  in terms of overall handsomeness if not in actual physical facial  resemblance.

Don't worry, Mom, Dad, Uncle Steve, Uncle Scott, or Judge Alex: I have not developed a sudden affinity for and/or attraction to "bad boys." I have no intention whatsoever of hooking up (in any sense of the term) with  a gem of a pen pal from one of the state's or nation's many high-quality correctional facilities. Instead, I'm merely noting what I perceive as a rather  unlikely resemblance between an inmate currently housed in San Quentin's famous Death Row Wing and a Kardashian by association.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cary_Stayner

Book of Mormon Stories

I'm finally going to see it! My dad thinks I need some Ativan.

Tonight! I'm going! To see the "Book of Mormon" musical. For me, this is like Christmas, my birthday, and the day the professor suddenly becomes too sick to lecture and cannot find a substitute on such short notice, all rolled into one.  Mere words cannot express my level of excitement.

A group of us from med school, plus a few strays several of us are dragging along, will be meeting up before the play  at the private home of a relative of someone's friend, who graciously offered to let us gather at his home to party so we wouldn't spoil the summer fun activities of some poor, unsuspecting family trying to frolic in the pool of the Holiday Inn or the Marriott or whatever hotel upon which we might have chosen to descend.

Cool Guy from my cohort has been in town since yesterday. He asked if he could visit on his way. my parents  said he could sleep last night at our house since i'm not sleeping there. I'm here with my Godchild. I was originally going to ride with my brother and my cousin Josh and Jared, but i'll probably ride with cool guy  unless a generous aunt offers the use of her oversized SUV, in which case we can all travel together. 

Taiwanese-American  girl from San Francisco (the one whose younger sister has fashion sense and dressed me up well enough that I had all male eyes on me during my oral presentation) is taking the train to Fresno and will meet us there. We have to have enough room in whatever vehicles we take to squeeze her in with her luggage as well, She's  coming back to spend a couple of days with me, after which she
will take the train to the LA area to visit with another classmate.  Her family is starting to irritate her, and she needs a break. She doesn't realize it, but about this time next year, she will wish for a break from medical school and want to be back with her family.

I'll tell you about it tomorrow, though I can almost guarantee it  will be fabulous unless it's one gigantic hoax, and at the end they drag everyone out of their theatre seats into some humongus baptismal font they've erected and dunk us in it, and we walk out of the place as official Mormons whether we want to be or not. I seriously doubt such to be the case, though, as Judge Alex would have warned me. He says he's seen it something like three or four times, and, no disrespect intended toward Judge Alex, but he really wouldn't make a very good Mormon.

I'll close with the lyrics of an actual Mormon kiddies' song. It sounds like one of those bad  imitation native American songs in beginning piano books, and the children do politically incorrect actions as they're singing the song.  I'll also try to find a video of some LDS children singing the song with the actions. Both would probably be copyright violations, but what's a copyright violation or two between friends?

Book of Mormon stories like my teacher tells to me
Are about the Lamanites in ancient history.
Long ago their fathers came from far across the sea,
Given this land 
If they lived
Righ --- teous ---  ly!

Lamanites met others who were seeking liberty,
And the land soon welcomed all who wanted to be free.
Book of mormon stories say that we muct brothers be,
Given this land
If we live
Righ --- teous --- ly!

Incidentally, when I was six and staying with relatives  in Utah, I got dragged out of the Primary room and spanked for refusing to do the actions or sing this song because the whole thing was so freakingly politically incorrect.

These kids don't even know the second verse. In my day, it's something you should have known by the time you turrned  two or else that meant there was something seriously wrong either with you or with your parents, but there's something about today's kids . . . They just keep getting lamer and lamer.

One of My Closest Friends for a Very Long Time:TV

my idea of heaven as a child

Until I have the birth of a new baby to report, I'll write frequently off and on about television and its impact on my life.  I should probably take the time to explain why television was such a huge deal to me even though I was limited to an hour of viewing time on school days and two hours a day on non-school days unless I was sick. While most of my contemporaries were children of technology, I was not. Early in my life, we did not have video games in our home. I played them on occasion at other people's houses, but because I didn't play them all that often, I wasn't very skilled at them. Who would be thrilled about playing a game that she was virtually guaranteed to lose every time she played?  Video games weren't usually my first choice of entertainment when I went to another child's house to play.

We had computers in our home since before I was born, as both parents used them for work purposes, and Matthew and  I were allowed to use them for research purposes and email. I then had the situation about which I wrote once in greater detail, in which I gave out too much information online to a child predator. My computer privileges were cut off for longer than two years to the point that in my early years of high school, I had to either take my brother's turn at doing the dishes for however many times we negotiated so that he would type a given paper for me (Matthew is a very skilled typist), or use an old IBM typewriter that my parents still had lying around to type the paper myself.

The school banned me from the use of technology as well. Since what happened did not happen on school computers or on school time, my parents could have challenged that ruling successfully, but they did not want me to have access to computers at home or at school. I was forbidden the use of technology everywhere.  Microfiche in our school library had just been discarded at and replaced  with a computerized version of the dinosaur  method of accessing ppast periodicals, limiting my access of past periodicals to those of which the school still had hard copies.

I wrote a research paper on the U.S. space program when I was a freshman. The paper ended with the  sentence: "Aerospace technology is increasing at such a rapid rate that man may soon land upon the moon." The sentence was a paraphrase from the most up-to-date volume on the subject of space technology that could be found in the library. I didn't cite it because the wording was sufficiently different that plagiarism could not have been charged based on the wording, and the sentiment was common knowledge at the time the book was published, which was 1965, if my recollection is correct.  

The library had thrown out much of its nonfiction section because the Internet had essentially rendered it obsolete. Magazine subscriptions were being cut back drastically as a cost-saving measure because the only magazines actually read by anyone other than faculty were Teen Vogue and Seventeen. The other pertinent information needed from the periodicals could be accessed from the Internet. The school didn't bother updating its volumes with much nonfiction because it wasn't being used. The library budget was spent on fiction and techological resources.

It was just an English paper, but the teacher gave me a failing grade for factual inaccuracy.  I challenged the grade on the premise that I was allowed to use only hard copies of books and magazines in the school library and wasn't granted access to the  public or university libraries because of my technology ban, which neither institution would have taken the responsibility of enforcing.  The English teacher looked in his spare time for a week, but could not find  a single book or magazine in the school library that made any reference to the apollo voyage. The appeal committee of the department chair and my counselor overrruled my English teacher, and the grade was , changed over the loud protests of the english teacher, to an A.  

Even though I won the challenge, my parents were upset with me for what they considered a smart-@$$ed maneuver, and grounded me from television for two weeks. I was expected to fly under the radar of trouble at school, and receiving an F grade on a paper, then challenging it on a technicality, did not constitute "flying under the radar" as far as my parents were concerned. It was at that point that my mother, who worked in upper-level administration for my school district,  instructed all school personnel to email her if either my brother or I as much as sneezed too loudly in class.  My brother still blames me for the Nazi-like regime under which we existed throughout high school.  I maintain that my brother was a much bigger trouble-maker than I, and my incident and my mother's action caused him to be extremely careful and sneaky to avoid ever getting caught.

I have complete respect for those of you who came of age in the '70's or '80's or earlier, who had to type all your papers with typewriters. Essays were bad enough, but the annotated research papers were killers.  I at least had the benefit of my teachers requiring APA or MLA formatting, both of which used parenthetical documentation. My dad has told me horror stories about the teachers who required the footnotes at the bottom of each applicable page. a student would type the page, then find that one of the footnotes did not fit on ther page. He would then have to re-type the entire page.  There was no making a few quick adjustments on a computer and reprinting. 

Matthew and I didn't get cell phones until high school. I was given one even though I was still under the technological ban. Due to a misunderstanding between myself and my parents, however, I was under the mistaken impression that our cell phone plan had unlimited texting. In the second month of ownership of my phone, I ran up a six-hundred-dollar bill through my own texting, not even counting anyone else's charges. I offered to take the six hundred dollars from either my long-term savings or my discretionary account, which was sizable for that f a child my age because I was well-paid as a part-time semi-professional musician. 

My parents refused my offer. Instead, my cell phone was replaced with a child's cell phone which had eight numbers I could call: both of my parents' work numbers (my dad's was somewhat moot, as he had so many of them, but he had an assistant at one location who could reach him at any time), both parents' cell numbers, our home phone number, andthe home and cell numbers of my Uncle Steve and Aunt Heather, along with 911, which was automatic with most models of kiddie phones. 

The kiddie phone  also had a major microchip feature that allowed either my parents or the 911 dispatcher to pinpoint my location very quickly. That feature, though I felt insulted at having it at the time, protected me from much worse injury than I would have otherwise sustained the time I was attacked in the school restroom. I don't buy into that line of which many peoplle are particularly fond about everything happening for a reason, but the sequence of events that forced me to give up my regular cell phone for that kiddie one was a bigger blessing than I'll probably ever know. 

Anyway, while other kids my age were playing video game [particularly the boys]. practically texting theit thumbs off,  and whiling away hours on Myspace and later Facebook, I was studying, practicing musical instruments, reading (which I loved and continue to love), participating to some degree in school sports, and watching television. Even though I probably watched less TV than the other kids who had technological privileges (they didn't spend as much time either studying, reading, or practicing musical instruments), TV was probably a much bigger factor in my life than it was in the lives of most of my peers.

Getting to watch the TV programs I absolutely had to see  became a major exercise in budgeting. The DVR became a life saver. There was an hour of Judge Alex that I couldn't miss. If Judge Alex appeared on any other program and I happened to know about it, I couldn't miss that, either.  Depending upon the year, there might have been Seventh Heaven, (sorry to make you gag, Knotty), Gilmore Girls, The Office, Roseanne reruns (which I usually saved up on the DVR for days when I was sick), and   the non-negotiables of House MD, South Park, The Daily Show, and The Colbert Report.  At one time I was even a Law and Order junkie, though I had to stop watching SVU after the restroom assault incident. Any PBS-type documentary about the JFK-shooting or Watergate was also something I felt i could not miss, though my parents sometimes gave me a free pass on that sort of programming and allowed me to watch it without counting it against my tV viewing time. (Big Love I watched at Claire's house. We didn't have HBO, so she DVRed it for me.)

The programs I felt I must watch (though not all of them were on my list any given year) exceeded the nine hours a week during the school year, assuming there were no school holidays. Watching everything took some creativity on my part.  I knew which friends liked which programs, and I used them to record shows to watch with me when i visited them.  Additionally, my parents awarded us a one-time bonus of ten extra hours of tV viewing for each perfect report card, either quarter or semester. (Anything less than a perfect report -- even a minus behind an A on a mid-quarter progress report -- resulted in revocation of all TV privileges until the teacher reported to my parents that the grade was back to a full A.)

Even before the track and field injury and subsequent restroom assault, I was sick more than was the average child, and my parents placed no restrictions on TV when we were sick, at least in part because we had to display measurable or observable symptoms to stay home due to illness, and because neither of us, despite the extra TV privileges, wanted to stay home from school. I can remember being forced to remain at home or at my Aunt Heather's house, or having been forced to leave school during the day due to illness  on numerous occasions, but I don't once remember faking symptoms even during my half-year with Mrs. Moore. I remember not enjoying TV very much when I was sick, though it did take my mind off the discomfort to some degree.

Due to an extended babysitting experience with an incredibly lazy sitter, Matthew and I also had some early exposure to soap operas.  I'll share that at some point in the near future.

Just before I turned sixteen, in my final year of high school, my Godparents remodeled my room and placed a TV in it. They felt they had to give Matthew a TV as well to be fair. My parents relented because Matthew and I had shown ourselves to be responsible students. All limits were lifted.

In the upcoming days I shall expand upon my life as a TV junkie. I'll discuss programs i especially liked that, looking back, I cannot believe I ever liked. I'll talk a bit about how my political views were shaped in part by the TV I watched.  Perhaps most importantly, I'll share how I gradually came to the realization that, for me anway,  real life is actually better than television.

Happy Birthday, America. and Mr. President, I liked your soulful rendition of Amazing Grace. It took b@!!s to have done that.

Colm' Keegan's Music Theory Class

The title isn't really the topic of this post. I just didn't want to bury Colm's publicity in this post. I'll add another picture just to keep the publicity current.  I want this guy to suceed in his project. It's innovative, and music theory is a topic about which not enough people are sufficiently educated. Hell, I have two degrees in music performance and I'm taking the class. It has nothing whatsoever to do with what the professor looks like. I merely want to become more musically erudite.

He even LOOKS professorial.

Uncle Scott moved Jillian to the couch so he can sleep and the two of us can behave as  fools without disturbing anyone. Baby Andrew is sleeping peacefully. He had a bottle at midnight, so he should be good to go at least until 6:00 a.m. when the nanny arrives.

Anyhow, I cannot sleep and my Aunt Jillian is trying to turn her days and nights around because she believes her in utero baby, who will probably be born in the next two weeks, though that's still quite early, will sleep better at night if Jillian is awake more at night now. It would work better if Jillian could walk around more, but she can only walk to the bathroom and shower and back. Once she hits 33 weeks of gestation if she makes it that long, the doctor is going to give her carte blanche to walk around the house. He doesn't want her hiking to the summit of Mt. Whitney ***  or anything that strenuous, but around the house and yard will be fine.

There's a limit to how much longer Jillian can go without her first string cystic fibrosis drugs, which are not all that compatible with pregnancy, and labor will probably start on its own anyway, although the OBGYN thinks the amniotic sac is still far too strong for the baby to rupture at her current size. Labor often starts without water breaking first, though. I've predicted July 8 as the baby's birthdate. That would have her born at just about 33.5 weeks of gestation. I am not, however gifted I may think I am in many other areas, a clairvoyant.  Chances are that this kid will show up whenever the hell she pleases.

I've seen the 3-D ultrasound of this child. She's not going to win any early baby beauty contests. Babies often get cuter though. I'm told by everyone by my dad, who insists he always thought I was beautiful, that I was uglier than sin itself when I was born. I weighed, at 2.2, even less than Jillian's baby will weigh.  Most people who knew me then say I was at least not butt-ugly by the time I was maybe four months old. 

Just because a baby is born ugly doesn't mean she's doomed to a life of repugnance. Some relatives say I still haven't recovered from my repugnant phase, but they're the same people who believe douching with Coca-cola shortly after doing the wild thing prevents pregnancy, and that's even after the pregnancy that Coca-cola failed to prevent that they hold to this belief. I don't take their insults  exceedingly personally. If they think I'm homely, it probably means that I'm practically Miss America. (I'm being facetious. I do not consider myself necessarily even conventionally pretty, much less beauty pageant material. Thigh gaps are popular now, but I don't think they're supposed to be almost as wide as the Grand Canyon.)

We're expecting that Jillian's new little one will be pulchritude-challenged (vocabulary word for the day, for which context alone should help you define if you didn't happen to have memorized the word in high school SAT preparation). The baby WILL,  however, eventually be pretty. Two people who look as pretty and handsome as her parents do would have a tough time producing a child with sub-average looks, though I've heard it has happened before.  

You know how the tabloids at the checkout counter -- the cheap-looking magazines with outrageous stories on the covers that most of us never buy [though someone must or they wouldn't be there taking up all that space]  but do occasionally thumb through --sometimes have stupid contests-like features, like husbands and wives who resemble amazingly, or people who look startlingly like their dogs or cats? One of those tabloids should offer contest-like features with the ugliest parents who have the best-looking children, and vice versa. They'd have to have the Jerry-Springer-like feature of  paternity tests, the revealing of such,  and the resulting breakups when daddy is not who he is supposed to be, but that could add to the drama. Jerry Springer, Maury Povich, Steve Wilcos, and the producers of Paternity Court might try to sue for some sort of copyright infringement, but what is new in a tabloid being sued? 

Regarding Paternity Court if it is even still on the air on one of the 666,666 channels offered through some cable, satellite, community access, or other system, exactly what is or was the point of that program? Paternity tests were supposedly taken early enough for the results to be ready by the  time the show was filmed. Then the parents would come onto the stage and caterwaul obscenities, most of which were bleeped out, at one another for twenty-one of the twenty-two minutes of actual air time of the show, minus commercial time. All anyone really heard, anyway, was the bleeping out of obscenities. The program might just have well have been one of the weekly tests of the Emergency Broadcast System with all the bleeping sounds that were aired. At some point there would be an obligatory shot of the adorable baby cooing (it almost always seemed to be a boy) in his infant seat in the green room. Then, in the final fifteen seconds of air time, the envelope revealing the results would be opened. Depending upon the results, one parent or the other non-parent would physically attack the other. Then the show would end. Why not just read the damned results in the firsrt place and get it over with?

My thought was, "They took Judge Alex off the air and left this &$%#@*!  on?" Where was the thought process in that, and what studio executive would like to stand up and take responsibility for the decision?

Speaking again of tabloids , I just looked at  one a few days ago that said that Jeb Bush is a former drug dealer. I don't know tons about the background of Jeb Bush. Perhaps he was a pharmacist before entering politics. It would be just like a tabloid to spin that one around and refer to a pharmacist as a drug dealer. Though I'm not afraid of an administration with Jeb Bush at the helm and wouldn't feel as though I needed either to slit my wrists or to move to Canada or Australia if he were elected, he's not my first-choice candidate, and I'm far from his number one fan. Still, Jeb Bush as a former drug dealer? Doesn't that seem to be just a bit of a stretch?

Segueing now to both tabloids and to Judge Alex (the person as opposed to Judge Alex the show), has Judge Alex ever been featured in a tabloid? I would think one of my acquaintances would have mentioned it to me if they had seen an article or headline featuring him. If not, why not? He's important enough to be in a tabloid.  Janice Dickinson has been on the cover of tabloids. That despicable teacher in Dance Moms has been there. Carrot Top, too, has been there. The entire Honey Boo Boo family has been on the covers of numerous tabloids. So why not Judge Alex? What is so inferior about him that the tabloids haven't fabricated stories about him? I'm not saying the judge, his wife, his mother, or even I would be happy with the stories these veritable chronicles of untruth would spin about him. I'm merely wondering why he is not every bit as worthy of the attention as is the next celebrity. Jaci, you're in the media, though not the tabloid media. Surely you could do something to right this wrong!

*** I reached the summit of Mt. Whitney, though by the skin of my teeth. I don't think I've covered the topic before in my blog.  It was a shining example of stellar parenthood on the part of my father [sarcasm font], which is all the more reason to share the story. I'll get to it soon.

The Judge and I

the judge looking particularly distinguished

Months ago a wrote a preamble to my tribute to Judge Alex, yet real life got in the way of writing the actual tribute. I'll give it a try now, though I fear my efforts will be a bit lame.

Judge Alex came into my life at a time when I was nearly fifteen and heavily into the throes of adolescent rebellion even if I wasn't physically there yet. I used up an insane amount of the family TV's DVR space so that I wouldn't miss a single episode of his TV program. On the rare occasion that something went wrong and the day's episode didn't get recorded, I would go into a tirade.

I was eventually allowed to have a Twitter account. Soon thereafter, I discovered that Judge Alex had one as well. I doubted the authenticity of his contributions to the account, but still I read his every word, and responded at a rate that I felt he wouldn't consider overly pesky or obnoxious. As far as I could tell, he ignored my tweets, though he later said that he read and continues to read all tweets but just didn't and still doesn't have the time to respond to all of them. That's certainly understandable.

The first clue I received that Judge Alex had noticed my existence was when I announced that I would be on hiatus until final quarter grades were released because one of my A's had a minus behind it on my mid-quarter progress report. It was a teacher I did not like, and my goal had been to score the lowest possible A I could possibly earn so that it would cause the instructor great pain to give me the A.  He got even by putting a minus after the A even though on official grades, minuses and pluses could not be entered. It was really a dirty trick on the instructor's part, because he knew my parents would overreact and take away privileges, but I own my part in the debacle, as I should not have cut it so close. For what it's worth, I aced the course at quarter and semester and had the highest score in the class.

Anyway, I knew about the minus after the A before grades were entered into the computer, so I announced to Judge Alex via Twitter that I would be absent from Twitter for awhile untile either my parents grew brains or until new grades were posted. He responded with, "We'll miss you, Alexis." That was all it took. It was the cyber-equivalent to feeding a stray cat. Everyone knows that once you feed a stray cat, it never goes away. I was hooked on Judge Alex for better or for worse.

Judge Alex got me through many difficult times. A few in particular stand out. My father and I were fighting over whether or not I needed to get a flu shot. My dad wanted me to have it. I, of course wanted no part of anything that involved sticking a needle into my skin. I solicited the judge's opinion as to whether or not a fifteen-year-old (I think I was saying I was sixteen at the time; I have a habit of lying about my age to make myself seem older) should have the right to make his or her own decision concerning medical matters such as flu shots.  The judge gave the classic noncommital answer that it depends on the situation and the maturity of the kid, and that it should be on a case-by-case basis.  My father ended up taking mattters into his own hands by sneaking into my bedroom at 5:00 a.m. and injecting me with the dreaded serum. I'm pretty sure I woke up the entire neighborhood with my tantrum. To top it off, I got a really nasty case of the flu that turned into pneumonia that year. So much for parental wisdom. The judge was kind enough to commiserate with me after the fact.

Another time in particular in which I sought the judge's assistance was a situation that sounded as though it was a plot line in a really bad sitcom -- the kind that runs for six episodes before the ratings are so low that it disappears from the airwaves forever, never to be seen or heard of again.  A highly cognitively challenged but quite attractive cheerleader had asked my brother to the prom. The prom in our high school was not typically a girl-ask-boy thing, but I'm not putting the cheerleader down for bucking tradition in that regard, and I see nothing wrong with the idea that a girl asked a boy to the prom. It wasn't even my issue that this cheerleader in particular invited my brother, brain-dead though she may have been. The issue, which concerned my parents far more than I, was that A) this girl was known for giving freely of sexual favors, and B) the word on the street, which reached my mother through the faculty gossip grapevine, was that this promiscuous cheerleader intended to use prom night as a means to gain access to my brother's seed, so to speak. She felt that with her looks and  Matthew's brains (intelligence is relative; to this bimbo, Matthew seemed like a bona fide Rhodes scholar) and looks, the two of them could have produced a perfect physical and mental specimen. In short, the plan was for her to seduce my brother and bear his child.

Any sane parents on the planet would have told their son he needed to find another prom date, but the bimbo cheerleader was from the wrong side of the tracks, so to speak, and my parents did not wish to be perceived as snobs. Their solution was that Matthew and his date would double date with me and my escort. While this seemed a perfect solution to my parents, my brother and I were having conniption fits over it. I offered all sorts of alternatives including offering to buy a pack of condoms for Matthew at my own expense, or having my dad give Matthew chemical castration pills for a week under the guise that they were anti-acne meds, which he would have gobbled down as though they were Skittles. Finally, in sheer desperation, I pled with Judge Alex to reason with my parents and to try to explain to them that brothers and sisters simply do not double date to a prom unless they live somewhere deep in the Ozarks or Appalachia. The judge's response was something to the effect of, "I feel your pain, Alexis, but this is really your parents' call to make."  Even though he didn't intercede on my behalf, it was comforting that he even read what I wrote and took the time to respond.

As it turned out in my soap opera-like existence, weeks before the prom, I had a freak hurdling accident with multiple broken bones including a compound tibia-fibula fracture, and was wheelchair-bound at prom time.  My proposed date, not wanting to be seen at the prom with a gimp, unceremoniously canceled our date in a cafeteria full of students, not including me.  My brother got even with the jerk by having his baseball teammate through a ball  at the non-date's bac during a situation drill in baseball whe the creep was running in the wrong lane. My best friend and her date doubled with my brother and the bimbo, and my brother's seed didn't get close enough to bimbo's intended target to even do a quick tango, much less to conceive the perfect physical and mental specimen.

Judge Alex became my personal Ann Landers or Dear Abby, sometimes offering advice and sometimes not, because he couldn't possibly respond to everything. He helped me through the hardships of developing later than my peers, of getting braces at a late age, and of going off to medical school before I was quite sure I was ready to leave the nest. He did all of tis without ever undermining anything my parents said. As a result, my dad is also now a fan. I think my Dad was more upset that I when "Judge Alex" the TV show was canceled.

I suppose at times what I really wanted was to run away to Florida and to be adopted by the Ferrers because they would have been such cool parents as opposed to the oppressive mother and father to whom I was born. I know now about the grass always seeming to be greener elsewhere, and that a 
person needs to be careful about what he or she wishes, and all those other cliches. My suspicion is that the Ferrers probably wouldn't have been any less pushovers as parents than my own parents were, but no one could have told me that back then.

Once when I was feeling somewhat ignored by the judge and  commiserated to Jaci, a friend I met through the judge, that I had been relegated to persona non grata status as far as the judge was concerned, Jaci mentioned it to him and he asked for my cell phone number and actually called me. Even had the rest of the year been a disaster, which it wasn't as I passed my senior violin recital with highest honors graduated from university at the age of 19 with technically a triple major and was accepted into my first-choice medical school, the personal phone call from Judge Ferrer alone would have salvaged the year. 

My friend Knotty wrote about how you can pay a specified amount and Merrill Osmond will call a person and talk the person of a ledge of a tall building or some such thing. I didn't need to be talked off the top of a multi-story building or anything of that sort, but just the same, I'd rather have a call from Judge Alex, even if I'd had to pay for it, than one from Merrill Osmond, and the call from Judge Alex didn't cost me a cent.

The judge even told me to keep his phone number and not to do anything stupid like publish it on the Internet but to call him if I ever really needed to talk. I haven't abused the privilege, but if the time comes when the course load becomes overwhelming and I feel like climbing to the top of a tower and ending it all, or even thinking of quitting med school, I'll probably call him first before resorting to drastic measures.

Some of the judge's followers may feel competitive in regard to his attention, but I don't. Some of my closest Internet allies -- paarticularly Jaci and Becca -- are people i met through the judge. I think I may even have met Marianne through the judge. Through my friend Knotty, I was introduced to the judge's wife's brother, who responded to one of my posts.

I'm still physically very much in the thick of adolescence -- if I were a male, my voice would be cracking all over the place  -- but mentally and emotionally, I'm an adult.  The first time you either cut into a cadaver or deal with a seizing patient until more competent help arrives because you're the only person there,  you  either grow up or get out.  I chose to grow up. 

Adolescence was painful in many ways, and I had a few curve balls thrown at me that no girl should have to face. Still, that which does not kill you truly does make you stronger. I'm not certain I could have withstood all the hurdles, both literal and metaphorical, were it not for the attention of Judge Alex. I am forever in debt to him for his kindness when I needed it most.

The Great Stupidifier - Medical School

For anyone out there with masochistic tendencies who really wants to feel stupid, I recommend medical school.  It's not that my peers, classmates, competitors -- or whatever I would call them -- are doing much or any better than I am. It's just that there's nothing like meeting up with subject matter not available at any of my previous stations in academia or in life.  It highlights just how much I don't know when I study for twelve hours and feel as though I've barely made a dent in the material I  must commit to memory forever or at least for the duration of my professional career.

With academic work I've done in the past, I've known that much of it was not tremendously pertinent to my life. I could learn what I needed to learn to ace a course, and then choose to remember it if it was in anyway useful or interesting, or to forget it if it wasn't. It may be that someday I'll decide that in the grand scheme of things,  something that I'm learning right now really doesn't have much to do with my field of medicine or is otherwise cluttering my brain, and will have the freedom to forget it.

Somehow I doubt that such will be the case. I think the professors are probably speaking the truth when they tell us that learning about how cells form tissues and learning the early principles of molecular biology  and med school anatomy (not to be confused with the most advanced undergrad anatomy course available anywhere, which everyone in the class has taken) lay the foundations for everything we'll ever learn about the scientific aspects of healing.  I think what I'm learning now will have to remain in my brain for the foreseeable future, at least in some dormant form.

Very soon, I will undergo a few hours of clinical instruction regarding the basics of vital signs of the human body. This will enable me to process the basic intake of E.R. patients for just a very small amount of time each week.  It used to be, back in the dinosaur days when my dad went to medical school, that a med school students wouldn't get within shouting distance of a patient until Year # 3 of medical school. All that has changed. I'm not sure precisely why, as it seemed like a pretty good system to me. Perhaps it's because anyone willing to put in the time and effort can learn what's in a book, but for me and for most of the opposition (I don't love to think of those who are studying with me as such, but that's the way it is now if I'm to be honest), what will allow us to succeed or cause us to fail miserably in the field of medicine will be the ability [or inability] to synthesize what we've learned and somehow make sense of it and make use of it in the real world.

I can't speak for the experience of anyone else in the program, but for me, it's like building a bridge. Right now, I'm on one side of a body of water and building out across the water to another piece of land. I've built my bridge maybe a total of three feet into the roughly 10 miles of water I'll need to build it across in order to reach land again. In roughly two weeks, I'm going to take a helicopter or row a little boat or somehow get all the way across to that other section of land and start building the bridge from that side. I'll build on that side for maybe five minutes, then fly or row back to the other side to build again from the original side. I know what's on the very beginning of this side, and I'll know what's on the very start of the bridge on the other side very soon, but my two ends of the bridge are in no way even remotely close to being connected, and I have no clue just what it is that will one day connect them. I don't really know for certain that the ends of the bridge will ever connect.

I'm taking it on faith that all the people who have ever done this before me are not co-conspirators in some ginormously perpetrated hoax and that this is not some bizarre hazing ritual designed to cull the weak, ignorant, and insufficiently dedicated among us.  The anatomy part I get. Yes, a doctor has to know the bones and everything there is to know about each and every one of them.  Most of us knew all the bones before we ever set foot on campus for medical school interviews. Now we get the fun of actually finding them on a real [used-to-be] live human body. (Yes, I did throw up in my first anatomy lab, but I wasn't the only one to do so.)  It's the more abstract learning of cellular and molecular biology that is perplexing me. How what I'm learning in classrooms could ever have anything to do with removing someone's appendix, ridding someone's body of a kidney stone, or even stitching up some child's boo boo, is still very much a mystery to me.

I could take the easy way out.  I could do the job I plan ultimately to do with a mere PhD in biochemistry or even microbiology.  I chose this more difficult path, and now I'm really wondering into what sort of quagmire I've gotten myself.  And, at the end of the day when my head is just short of imploding and they let us out until morning, now I don't even have Judge Alex episodes with which to distract myself. (Curse you, Fox! And you have the audacity to call yourself a real network!)

If it sounds as though I'm treading water and just barely keeping my head above the surface, that's probably not a wholly inaccurate description of my current state.  The only thing really keeping me sane and here is that, while some are better at faking it than I, they're in every bit as much trouble as I am.  The ones who are the least stressed are the few who don't really belong here with the rest of us and haven't yet figured it out. Some of them believe that pass/fail grading means basically everyone passes. Everyone doesn't pass.

I will pass. It seems grim now, but I'll get through it. And I'll do the pre-clerkship portion of medical school in two years, not the three years that the administration is so heavily pushing us to extend it to. I know if it's difficult for me, it's even more difficult for some others.  I can see it in their eyes even if they pretend to be having the time of their lives.  Nobody here is both having fun and passing. It's interesting, but it's not fun. Any one of us who thinks he or she is having fun is going to be out of here after December.

It's accurate except for "What my family thinks." Too many people in my family have been to med school for anyone to believe this.

Preface to the Tribute to Judge Alex

This is merely the backstory. I'm saving ther best things I have to say about him until tomorow, or, at the very latest, before I head off to medical school on the 23rd.

Under ordinary circumstances, I'm  the absolute antithesis of  a procrastinator.  Whether it's dishes in the sink, material to be reviewed for a test, a composition that's due in four weeks, or piano accompaniment for a soloist that needs to be played through at least once prior to performance, it  goes against everything in my nature to save the job to be done until later. I'd wash the dishes before they'd even been used if doing so would accomplish anything. I  once went so far as to write an essay before the topic was assigned, making my best guess as to what the assigned topic might be, just in case I might be right and have a jump on the assignment.

Yet I'm  guilty beyond a reasonable doubt of procrastination when it comes to writing my personal eulogy, for lack of a better word, to the TV program Judge Alex.  I thank God and anyone else responsible for his continued well-being that it's only the TV show Judge Alex and not the star of the show himself, Alex Ferrer, that I'm eulogizing. Though the name of the show and the person hosting it have become synonymous in the minds of many, while the show is dead and gone [may it rest in peace] the man in the black robe 
continues to turn up on my TV. This very night, in fact, I saw him discussing the Daniel Pistorius case with Megyn Kelly on Fox News Channel's The Kelly File.

It occurred to me today that one obstacle to starting this rather daunting project is the back story, which threatens to take up more space than the actual tribute to Judge Alex itself.  (Note the  italics, which indicate that I'm referring to the TV program as opposed to the person. I'm not calling Alex Ferrer himself an it. I'm rude, but not that rude. To the best of my knowledge, Judge Ferrer's gender has never been in question.) While how I came across Judge Alex, and, in perhaps a sense, to know the man Alex Ferrer himself, is a part of the story, I didn't want the prequel to overtake the main event.  Additionally, there's that ever-present elephant in the room: we all know of the tendency with anything I write -- even something seemingly so unrelated as a research paper focusing upon sexual equality among pygmies dwelling in the Ituri rainforest, to be consumed by the inherent sub-theme of all my writings and, for that matter, of my life, which is the  almost unfathomable weirdness of those to whom I am related. 

The best way to keep such from happening, I decided, was to offer a preface or an introduction to the Judge Alex tribute. Perhaps doing such will  allow me get through the whos, whats, whens, wheres, whys, and hows of my relationship (I thought calling it a relationship might be a bit of a stretch, though the judge himself acknowledged it as such) with Judge Ferrer in order to proceed to the central theme in a more timely manner than might otherwise have happened . . . 

I began watching Judge Alex as a fourteen-year-old high school junior.  The circumstance by which I stumbled across the channel airing the show was of a most flukish nature. 

It was winter vacation. Ninety-nine out of one hundred parents would have considered their fourteen-year-old twins to be old enough to be at home alone for the daytime while their parents worked, but my parents are of a different archetype than are most of their parenting peers. My mother, as an educator in our school district, should, theoretically have had the same days off that the students in the district had.  She was, however, working  through part of her vacation with two other administrators on writing a grant to fund our district's teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease prevention program. The irony was not lost on her that simultaneously, as she was writing a document to prevent negative consequences associated with teen sex,   the behaviors she was writing a grant to prevent could be occurring in her own home even as she wrote. It was unlikely that Matthew or I would have had anything too hot and heavy going on with  members of the opposite sex (or, for that matter, with members of the same sex) since neither of us was anything resembling an early-bloomer, but had we each invited a few friends over, nature might have run its course, and God knows what the outcome might have been. For that matter, in my mother's paranoid version of events, one of us might have decided to throw a RAVE at 10:00 a.m on a Tuesday in our home, which, I'm sure, would have been terribly well-attended, and which would have negated the benefits of the anti-substance abuse education grant my mom planned to write during spring vacation. Regardless  of the specificity of concerns my parents (mostly my mother; my father mostly did as he was told when it came to my mother's concerns about our potential bad-acting) might have had concerning what Matthew and I might have chosen to do with our spare time had we been unsupervised, it wasn't going to happen. We had a babysitter, who happened to be my dad. He did what little of his work he could do at home. The remainder of his time, he just harassed us.

TV time, which while school was in session was heavily restricted, was monitored considerably more leniently during vacation. At some point one afternoon in the days before Christmas, I flipped on the TV to see Maury Povich materialize on the screen. It was a rather bizarre episode [I believe it was a repeated episode, though that's neither here nor there] featuring a stage full of morbidly obese babies and toddlers. Every race, color, and creed appeared to be represented on the stage. Something about the macabre nature of the episode prevented me from changing the channel. 

I recall there having been a child who was roughly two-and-one-half years old who was so overweight that she could neither sit up nor pull herself up. The only position she was capable of assuming was one of lying prone or supine on whatever surface upon she was placed unless she was propped. Her sole mode of locomotion was rolling from one place to another.

I also recall a baby who could not be lifted by his mother, a woman  of normal build who did not appear to suffer from particular weakness, nor was it expressed that she suffered from any sort of a debilitating condition. The child's father didn't lift him with great ease. They put the kid on a scale right there on the stage, and he, at the ripe old age of six months, weighed in at seventy-five pounds.

Then they spoke to the parent of one of the rotund babies. This child was right around the twelve month mark. I think he was a fifty-five pounder, which was almost thin by the standards of many of the babies on the stage that day. A panel including Maury, a pediatrician, and a registered dietician questioned the mother of the one-year-old about the child's breakfast on an ordinary day. I have to give the mother credit for honesty, as I would never have admitted it had that been my child's typical breakfast [nor could I have afforded it without resorting to a life of crime]. (Note: I'm quoting the mother. Her syntax is indicative of a particular ethnicity. I'm not trying to poke fun at how she expressed herself. I am somewhat inappropriately poking fun, sad as it is, at what she thought was appropriate to feed her baby. Regarding my depiction of her dialect, however, it's not intended to be funny. I'm just restating her words as she spoke them.)

"I fix him a dozen eggs for breakfast." (It reminded me vaguely of the song Gaston sings in Beauty and the Beast except that what Gaston sang about eating paled in comparison to what this baby was fed.) "He usually have a half a loaf of bread for toast, and I don't put no more than a cube of butter on all his toast, which ain't that much with that much toast. He like to have that white Karo syrup on his toast. He have a half a gallon of chocolate milk. I keep pouring it in his bottle until the half gallon is empty. They make them baby bottles too small. Even if he want more, he don't get no more unless he take regular milk with Nestle Quik in it. He have frosted flakes," she began.

"How much frosted flakes?" a member of the panel asked.

"Just a box," the mother answered. 

"One of those miniature boxes that comes in a variety pack?" the registered dietician asked hopefully, approximating the size of a miniature  box with her hands.

"No, a regular box," the mother answered, motioning with her hands to indicated a box about a foot high. "And he have Hostess doughnuts -- the white powdered sugar ones."

"How many?" the pediatrician asked, sounding  almost afraid to hear the answer.

"Just one," answered the mother.

"Just one doughnut?" queried the pediatrician.

"No," clarified the mother. "Just one box. And sometimes he eat cinnamon rolls too. Those Pillsbury Dough boy kind. If I don't have time to cook 'em for him, he eat 'em raw out of the can."

By this time my brother Matthew had wandered into the family room and was mesmerized by what he was seeing and hearing. Matthew himself was known for an ability to consume huge quantities of food without any evidence ever appearing on his body. "Jeez!" he said. "You all say I'm a pig, and it would take me a week to eat what this baby eats in a day!"

"That's just his breakfast,  Matthew," I explained.

"Holy Mother of God!" he exclaimed. (Mom wasn't home, so such language wasn't an issue.)

The mother continued. "And he like to drink a jug or two of that Sunny Delight drink. I think it's just real orange juice, but he won't drink real orange juice. I don't know why." She had a puzzled look on her face.

"Probably because  real orange juice is missing the  30% or whatever of  high fructose corn syrup that's in Sunny Delight," the registered dietician commented, shaking her head.

The pediatrician spoke up. "Ma'am, do you realize what you're doing to your child's health by feeding him in this way?"

The mother became defensive. "If my baby want to eat," she said in clipped syllables and in a hostile tone, "my baby can eat."  She punctuated her statement by folding her arms.

Meanwhile, Matthew scooped  a large bowl of ice cream and covered it with so much chocolate syrup that  a person who hadn't seen the concoction under construction could not have discerned that there was ice cream under the chocolate syrup. "Didn't you just have ice cream about an hour ago, Matthew?" my dad asked.

"Forty-five minutes, " Matthew corrected him as he shoved a spoonful of the ice cream / chocolate syrup  mix into his mouth.

"It's like an hour until dinnertime," my dad complained.

"If your baby want to eat, " I told my dad, "your baby can eat."

My dad groaned.

"Alexis, either change the channel or turn the TV off," my dad ordered.

"Why?" Matthew and I responded in unison.

"It's just getting to the good part," Matthew added.

"Because just listening to it is making me sick," my dad answered. "You heard me. Turn it off or change the channel. Those are your two options."

I reached for the remote control and clicked up one channel, which landed me onto Judge Judy. "Great," my dad groaned again. "The lady with the shrill Brooklyn accent. I'll have a headache in five minutes."

"We'll turn it back to Maury," Matthew offfered.

"We wouldn't want you to get a headache," I added.

"No, I'll take the shrill Brooklyn lady over the morbidly obese babies who drink Sunny Delight by the jug," he conceded, thoroughly disappointing both of us.

I don't even remember the specifics of the case Judge Judy was adjudicating except that it involved an engagement ring. One party or the other brought the ring to court, and Judge Judy was examining it, twirling it around in her fingers and looking at it in the light. She looked pointedly at the young  man who must have been the prospective groom. "It's not exactly the Hope Diamond, is it?" she asked in a most snarky tone. I felt bad for the young man, who had bought the ring he could afford. What did Judge Judy expect him to do? Go out and rob a bank so he could purchase a diamond that would have been considered minimally acceptable by her standards? Get someone to co-sign for him so he could access credit to buy a larger diamond, and then promise to pay the person back with his tax refund?

"Did you hear that?" I asked my dad. I thought of the diamond my own mom wore on her left hand. It wasn't very large, particularly by Judge Judy's standards.  It was all my dad could afford at the time he proposed to her, while he was still in medical school. She now wears a much larger diamond on her right hand, but the small one on her left ring finger is the one that has the greater sentimental value if only a fraction of the extrinsic value of the one on her right ring finger.

"Pretty hard not to hear it at the volume she speaks," my dad answered.

"That wasn't very nice of her," I expressed my opinion.

"No, it wasn't," my dad answered. "I'm glad you caught that.
I'm not saying the shrill Brooklyn accent [I'm sure he knew her name, or at least the "Judge Judy" portion of it, but he refused to admit to it or to use it]  is a bad person, but I don't think she has any clue as to how at least 90% of the world's population lives. Not everyone had a dentist father to pay her college and law school tuition. Either that, or she knows better but is playing a role she's being paid to play." he paused. "Either way it doesn't speak well for her." He paused again. "Alexis, you don't have to watch this show, either. If you have to watch TV, why don't you see what else is on."

I scrolled up the channels until I came across I man I hadn't seen before, a robe-clad man seated at a bench with a gavel in his right hand. Another TV court show, I thought to myself. It seemed that there were getting to be quite a few of the genre available for the public's viewing pleasure, particularly if one had cable, Direct TV, or satellite.  The man's rather large face seemed to take up most of the TV screen, or perhaps it was just the camera angle. He did have flawless skin, though -- skin that even TV cosmetics couldn't make to appear THAT good. He had lovely pearly-white teeth as well -- the kind my aunt had paid five thousand dollars in endeavor to procure but still hadn't quite managed to obtain. (I know how much the procedure cost her because she "borrowed" the money from my dad eight years ago and had yet to repay a cent. My dad's philosophy on lending money to relatives, particularly to ones of which he is less than fond, is often to go ahead and let them have the money they ask for. Then they avoid you like the plague. It's a small price to pay, he says, not to have to deal with them.) The judge's flawless skin was slightly olive-toned, and his hair, depending upon the way the light shone upon it, was either very dark brown or black. The man  looked oddly familiar, though I couldn't hazard a guess as to why.

"Dad, look at this guy. Have you seen him before?" I thought maybe he'd been on a TV series or perhaps had been a newscaster. 

My dad looked up from his work at the kitchen counter and stared at the TV for a moent. "He looks a lot like Uncle Jerry. He's probably Cuban-American, too." Once my dad mentioned it, I could see the resemblance.

My Uncle Jerry is not my uncle either by  biology or marriage but has been my dad's best friend since seventh grade, and I have always considered him my uncle. He was the obstetrician of record at my c-section delivery who signed my birth certificate, though my dad, also an MD, was the one who actually removed me from my mother's womb. Uncle Jerry took my brother Matthew out immediately afterward -- a fact I've never let my brother forget.  My brother may be bigger and everyone who doesn't know us may assume he's at least three years older than I, but birth certificates don't usually lie (unless you're one of those birther people  who refuse to believe that Barack Obama was born in Hawaii) and I am the older twin.

I started to scroll up to another channel. My dad stopped me. "Wait a minute" he requested. "Let's watch this for a sec."

I don't even remember that much about the case. I think it might have had something to do with whether or not a boy had permission to use his girlfriend's parents' ATV, and whose fault it was that it was wrecked when he was riding it. I can't even remember if the judge ruled in favor of the boy or the girl's parents, who were suing him for damages. What I remember was that the judge had a quick sense of humor and wasn't above taking an occasional verbal shot at a litigant who really opened himself or herself up to it, but, in general, tended to be  self-deprecating in his humor and to far more often make jokes at his own expense than at anyone else's. He had an easy ongoing banter with his bailiff, who was at that time a Houston police officer named Victor. The show was at the time filmed in Houston because the judge, who lived in Miami, had children and didn't want to give up an entire day of being with them each direction on flights from Miami to the shooting location.

My dad had wanted to watch because he was trying to identify the judge's regional accent. (The judge has no foreign accent.) After a few moments, my dad had accomplished his goal of identifying the judge's place of origin, or at least where he had grown up. "He's from Miami or at least south Florida. You can change the channel now if you want, but not either to Maury Povich or to the shrill Brooklyn lady."

"That's OK," I said. "I'll watch this."  I didn't realize it, but it was the very beginning of a nearly seven-year obsession.