Re-submitted because of a change my dad insisted upon and a couple of other I made on my own: Coke as a douche, sexual assault in a school restroom., and other things that may make a person's life seem extraordinary.

This anonymous family bears an eerie resemblance to  one branch of my father's family excpet that the number of spawn would need to be multiplied by at least ten..

One of my readers commented that I've led an exciting life. I don't really think such is the case. Maybe everyone looks at their own lives and thinks, "boooorrrrrinnnng." Maybe even Suri Cruise, the Kennedys, the Hiltons, and the combined Kardashian/Jenner debacle  look at their own lives and think the same thing, though I highly doubt it.

I will admit that my parents are funny people  -- even when they don't try to be funny. For that matter, they're only funny when they're not trying to be funny. Their actual attempts at humor are beyond lame. I have a large extended family of real relatives and an equally large group of pseudorelatives, basically the extended family of a guy who grew up with my father and to whose house my father excaped when the lunacy of his own home threatened to overcome him. More people = more chaos.

My family, like any family, has its sane members, its members who are on the brink of sanity/insanity, as in they're not wholly impaired enough to be kept under lock and key, but not necessarily of sufficiently sound mind to be allowed to run free, and then there are those about whom there is no question: they're certifiable. Everyone has some relatives falling in each of these categories. It's just that the larger one's extended family is, the more people there are  falling into the latter two categories.

One distinction needs to be made. There's eccentric, and there's all-out psychotic. My aunt Cristelle and her husband Mendel, who had the Wiccan wedding in which I was the flower girl who flitted and floated between each row of drunken guests blasting rose petals into their astonished faces with a mega-battery-powered wand, are eccentric.
They may have named their child Blitzen Manx, whom Ccristelle wanted to birth in a wooded field on a bed of roses until the first contraction hit, at which point she was rished to a hospital, where she was grasping the ties of every doctor who walked within her reach to demand an epidural. Cristelle and Mendel do, however,   at least get Blitzen Manx vaccinated, and he wears clothing.

On the other hand, there's my Uncle Mahonri, husband to my dad's sister Marthalene. He works for the Church Educational System. He's also either a confirmed kleptomaniac or an outright thief.  He was arrested while stealing a carton of disposable douches (Do they even make douches that aren't disposable anymore?  I certainly wouldn't know where to go to purchase one.) in the loading zone of a big box store in Sandy or Draper, Utah. (I always confuse those two communities.)  No one has any clue as to what was Mahonri's need for the disposable douches. I don't know if he didn't know what it was that he was stealing, or if there's a rampant problem with feminine hygiene in his immediate family. I try not to stand close enough to any of them to know for certain.

Mahonri's elsest daughter, Marthalette, is the cousin who thought pregnancy could be prevented by douching with Coca-Cola shortly after doing the evil deed. We know how effective is that method of birth control, as Marthalette conceived her first child shortly before her sixteenth birthday.  She married the lucky sperm donator, and the pair has since spawned eight more offspring. I don't know if she thinks she's the next Michelle Duggar and really wants all those children, or if she's still going with the Coca-Cola douche method of birth control. Sooner or later that magic amusement park with all those rides that go up and down, otherwise known as menopause, is going to put a stop to this madness. In the meantime, I'd expect at least another eight children -- possibly more if multiple births are invloved -- before she either dicovers that cococola douching is ineffective as a method of birth control or the government discovers the landfill so thoroughly ensconced in the filth of Marthalette's offspring's diapers that measures are taken to prevent another outbreak of Duggaritis. One thing my dad suggested recently is that Marthalette's choice of douching substance, if she's still using it,  may have something to do with the offspring of her children.  An acidic pH is advantageous to male sperm.
Marthalette has nine boys. It could be random, or it could be the Coca Cola inserted in that most strategic of body cavities..

Then there's Aunt Elyse, who has eleven kids, but can't cook, sew, comb a child's hair dedently, clean a toilet, or accomplish any other domestic task with any degree of competency or without going into some sort of manic-depressive state. (I'm aware that bi-polar is the preferred and politically correct term now, but manic -depressive more accurately depicts Elyse's state of mind during one of her episodes. She cycles from one extreme to the other with the rapidity of the Tilt-a Whirl at the county fair.) I happen to know - and if the rest of the family did, WWIII would break out - that my grandmother pays someone to clean her house, cook her meals, shop for her, do her laundry, and keep tabs on her children. With the time Elyse has because she's freed up from domestic chores, she designs crafts for Relief Society projects. She's the one who came up with the Santas crafted from unused tampons. (Mahonri should've stolen a crate of tampons. Some in the family might have actually had a use for those.) She also fashioned  portraits of both Jesus Christ and Joseph Smith by crushing egg shells, dying them, and gluing them strategically onto canvas. My dad said the two portraits looked a hell of a lot more like John Lennon and Yoko Ono than the two whom they were intended to represent, but he didn't say that to Elyse, because her husband is 6'5" and over three hundred pounds. He'd never catch my dad in a million years if my dad saw him coming, but were he to successfully pull off a sneak attack, the results could be devastating if not fatal.

That is the Reader's Digest Condensed Version of the weirdness is my family.  My whole life is not my family, though. I've had my share of bad things, good things, and stupid things happen to me, just like anyone has. Part of what might make the casual observer think my life is to eventful to be true is that I had a roughly one-year span of unbelievably bad luck. In less than a year  I 1) broke multiple bones in a freak hurdling accident, 2)was temporarily placed in an immobile state and with a kidney infection in the care of incompetent relatives who left me by myself in their third-floor attic with something toxic burning in the oven, forcing me to injure myself further in escaping, and 3) was sexually assaulted in a school restroom.  

Over the course of a lifetime, that much bad luck will fall upon most of us. I just happened to have it all happen within a very short period of time.  My life isn't all that much different that anyone else's. I've never been to  India or walked on the Great Wall of China. I've never been to a Super Bowl, World Series game, or NBA championship game.
I've never been in the Olympics, or even to the Olympics. I've never seen a baby be born. Hell, I've never even seen a puppy or kitten be born. I wasn't within three thousand miles of the World Trade Center when it went down. I've never met a President or Vice-President of the United States. I've never been in a hot air balloon. I have climbed Mt. Whitney barely. So out of fifteen major milestones, I've achieved a grand total of one.

I have a weird family, and I had a string of bad luck, including a mother who had leukemia. Those are my total claims to fame. The rest is just my OCD memory, which is really just an inability to forget. Everybody has done stuff like purchased proctology textbooks in Goodwill Stores, gone to children's parties dressed as "Trailer Trash Barbie," and attended sleepovers at mortuaries. Most people just don't remember the details quite so thoroughly.

The Time I Saved My Mother: A True Story

what my bone marrow transplant probably  looked like at the onset of the procedure

                            An Organ Donor of Sorts

My mom was first diagnosed with leukemia when I was five. Her initial treatment was the gold standard of over fourteen years ago, which was a particular cocktail of chemotherapy drugs and some radiation for good measure. The drugs appeared to be accomplishing their purpose, but the leukemia did what it sometimes does, which is to come back even stronger than ever inside a body that has been ravaged by the effects of chemotherapy and radiation and is strong enough neither to fight the disease nor to withstand another round of the drugs that might wage the battle. This is the point at which bone marrow transplants often come into play.
My dad had anticipated the possible need for a bone marrow transplant long before the need became an actual reality. As an oncologist/hematologist involved in research pertaining to particular forms of leukemia and lymphoma, he had in the initial months after the diagnosis anticipated an eventual need for the transplant and had quietly gone about the work of having all willing blood relatives tested for compatibility.
My mom expressed to my dad in the early months of the illness that, were a bone marrow transplant ultimately needed, she would be unwilling to receive bone marrow from my brother or me, or, for that matter, from any child. My father had downplayed the possibility. Children aren't often compatible donors for their parents, he told her. Then, as my mom's five available siblings (the sixth sibling was herself battling breast cancer and was not even considered as a donor) turned up one after another as unsuitable donors, my dad, on a whim, had himself tested. In what came as a major surprise to the rest of the medical community but not for some odd reason to him, my dad was a far more suitable donor for my mom than had been any of her siblings. He still wasn't a perfect match, but had no other donor been available, his bone marrow would have been close enough to attempt. He knew, however, that if he was an acceptable donor for my mother, that any offspring produced jointly by him and my mother would most likely be an even better match.
My brother and I were tested. Matthew was a good match. I was a better one. That knowledge was filed away in the hope that it would never be needed. It was, unfortunately, needed, as was discovered when the leukemia again reared its ugly head.
How does a team of medical professionals go about harvesting bone marrow from the body of a six-year-old girl without her mother's knowledge? It took the form of a bit of subterfuge involving a supposed trip to Disneyland for the mother's six-year-old twins. My Aunt Heather devised a scheme in which my mother would believe that she and my Uncle Steve were taking my brother and me to Disneyland. Another aunt's van was loaded with Matthew, me, and our suitcases. My mom stood on our front sidewalk, leaning on my dad for support and waving at us, watching as we pulled out of her sight. I believe she may have been crying, though she had a forced smile on her face. Her condition was probably as grave as it was since she had received the diagnosis. I wonder now if the thought had occurred to her that she might not see us again. I can still hear her in my mind arguing with my dad about the Disneyland trip late the night before we were to depart. She told him she didn't feel right about it, but was unable or unwilling to articulate her specific concerns. My dad was unusually adamant that we absolutely had to go on the trip, which wasn't, of course, a trip to Disneyland at all, but a way to get me away from my mother for long enough for medical team to give me the preparatory treatments and harvest the substance of life for my mother without her knowledge that I was in any way involved.

Three blocks away from our home, the van was stopped. The other aunt took her van back with Matthew in it. Matthew and the other aunt drove away to an amusement park that wasn't quite Disneyland but was close enough to pacify Matthew. My suitcase, my car seat, and I were loaded into Uncle Steve's car, and he and Aunt Heather took me to the hospital for the final round of blood tests and the first of the five injections to prepare me for the transplant. Additionally, I needed to be fattened up and nourished to the extent that could be done in the short amount of time with which the doctors had to work.  I was still recovering from  undernourishment to the point of actual illness resulting from an extended family member who was hired to care for Matthew and me while my father was dealing with my mother in the hospital,  but who instead  essentially left the to of us to fend for ourselves while she slept, watched mindless TV, and ran up our phone bill with long distance calls to her boyfriend. If the "babysitter"  ventured from the family room sofa beyond trips to the refrigerator and microwave to prepare her own frequent and calorie-laden snacks (Matthew and I were on our own in that regard), to the bathroom, and to her bedroom, I never witnessed it.

On the chilly December morning of the procedure, I arrived at the hospital before the sun did, wrapped in a blanket and carried by Uncle Steve, and still wearing my Britney Spears pajamas that some harebrained relative had considered a suitable Christmas present for a tiny five-year-old girl the previous December. (The Christmas before, the same relative had given Matthew and me stuffed dolls in the image of Eric Cartman and Stan. My parents allowed us to keep them since we had no clue who the two characters were and had no knowledge of the program.) My hands clutched the stuffed baby harbor seal my Uncle Steve had purchased at the hospital gift shop the previous day after I had cried during the final preparatory injection, and a nurse assisting with the procedure had been particularly insensitive in berating me because at the age of six I was too old to cry just because of an injection. i was told that later my father ripped into the lady as though she had attempted a presidential assassination,which,under the circumtances, was probably appropriate.(The stuffed baby harbor seal is the only stuffed animal that remains from my childhood still in my possession today.)  Uncle Steve handed me to my dad, who had been waiting for us in the hospital's lobby. My dad carried me as we made our way into the elevator and up to the fifth floor.
We were rushed through the preoperative station. My vital signs were taken, an IV was inserted, the anesthesia took effect, and all that was left was for some overweight woman to belt out an aria hours later that day after the marrow was injected into my mother's body.  I spent the night in the hospital as a precaution, but everything had proceeded without the slightest glitch in the plans. Uncle Steve, my dad's younger brother, who was at that time a first-year pediatric resident, stayed  in my hospital room with me all night, as did his wife. Steve was entitled to only three weeks of vacation time all year, and nine of his days off that year were burned in the process of getting me to the places I needed to be in order for the transplant to happen and to caring for me afterward. My dad told me later that he had tried to pay my uncle for his time but that Steve had refused to accept any compensation whatsoever. He and my aunt wouldn't even allow my dad to reimburse them for the  cost of the stuffed baby harbor seal, which, at hospital gift shop prices, probably set them back roughly as much as a week's worth of groceries.
My assumption was that the source of my mother's donated bone marrow was never intended to be a life-long secret -- that my dad planned to someday share the rest of the story with her -- but the particulars had not been broached. As it turned out, it didn't really matter. Some children may be better at keeping secrets than others are, but with most of them, the truth will eventually emerge. It did in my case.
On Christmas morning of that year, my brother and I, after the initial wave of opening presents, had forgotten our greed for just long enough to remember that each of us had made and wrapped little token gifts at school to give to our parents. Our father stood empty-handed as we both thrust our gifts at our mother, eager for her approval. She first opened my gift, which was a crudely-fashioned angel ornament, with a shiny pipe cleaner halo and silvery paper wings, and with my school picture  strategically yet incongruously placed where the face of the angel should have been. Mom smiled and thanked me. Then she opened my brother's gift, which was a refrigerator magnet framed by tiny green- and red-painted puzzle pieces. From my mother's reaction, one would have thought that either my brother or his teacher had personally invented both puzzle pieces and refrigerator magnets, as well as green and red paint. My brother eyed me smugly,  as if to imply, "I guess we know who won the battle of the tacky school-made Christmas gifts this year."
Without thinking, I responded to his sneer by blurting out, "So what? I gave her bone marrow!" Oops. Sorry, Daddy. The elephant-sized cat was out of the bag and in clear view of everyone in the living room. 
My dad carried me up the stairs and more or less threw me into my bedroom and slammed the door. I heard the door to my parents' room slam as well, then I heard my dad open it and go in, and then I heard a whole lot of shouting. At one point my brother pounded on my parents' door and asked if he could ride his new scooter outside. My dad told him no and to play with his Thunderbirds Tracy Island toy instead.
Eventually the shouting stopped. We all came out of our rooms. I attempted to throw my hand-made angel ornament into the fireplace, but my dad's reflexes were and still are quicker than mine. the anfel ornament was salvaged.   it doesn't hang on our yearly Christmas tree, but  instead is in a fireproof safe in our home. My parents say that if a Christmas tree ever turn our house into an inferno, they don't want the ornament destroyed with the house, It means something to them now, apparently, that it doesn't mean to me and that it didn't mean at the time my mother first  opened it -- something about a gift from the heart of a child made  a with a few cheap craft supplies in a manner that appeared haphazard having more significance than it would appear at a first glance, and the importance of a child's feelings and of showing proper appreciation for what must have been a difficult task for me. (I remember bursting into tears when I the silver poster board wings i tried to cut, no matter how careful i was, came out looking like everything but angel wings. I believe I cut four sets of poster board wings -- and cutting through poster board with hands the size of a three-year-old while using scissors barely sharp enough to easily penetrate tissue paper was no small undertaking,  before ending up with anything that was remotely close to angel wings. I finished my ornament at recess, long after the other children had moved on to other activities and assignments. Even then, the little shrew sitting next to me remarked that my finished project looked more like a witch than an angel. Mom and Dad weren't particularly impressed when my mom opened the gift,  but my mom says I'll understand more fully why they value the ornament to the degree that they do, and what it taught them about seemingly inconsequential interactions between parents children and the worth of a gift from the heart when, God willing,  I have a child or two of my own.

Relatives arrived at our house bearing gifts and Christmas dinner, which my mom and I picked at and everyone else ate. That night when my mom came upstairs to put me to bed, I clung to her as she hugged me good night. Prying my fingers off her body would have taken more strength than she possessed. She carried me (I don't know where she found the energy, even as light as I was) to her bed and lay down with me attached to her, and I slept in my parents' bed that night. Given the bombshell that I'd dropped earlier in the day, Dad wouldn't exactly have gotten any action even if my mom hadn't been fighting  leukemia.
A nasty  strain of the  flu was circulating, and my mom and I both came down with it. Each of us developed pneumonia as a complication of the flu and had to be hospitalized. My mom was there for more than two months. I was in a hospital in California for about three weeks, until I was stable enough to be air-transported to Florida, where I stayed for the next ten weeks or so with my dad's best friend, an MD, and his wife, a pediatric nurse practitioner turned stay-at-home mom, who took excellent care of me.
We're now months from the thirteenth anniversary of the bone marrow donation. It hasn't been an entirely rock-free path to get us to here from there, but my mom is thriving, with no sign of any return of the leukemia that threatened to take her life thirteen years ago, and I do not in the least miss the bone marrow that it took to keep her here.

This was similar in a way to the ornaments we made except that ours were silver-toned rather than gold, the wings and angel gowns were not traced from our hands and feet (I think teachers overuse the hand-and-feel technique in children's art projects; sometimes it works, but other times it just seems contrived), and there were  small sticks of silver pipe cleaner connecting the halos to the heads so that the halos could be positioned horizontally above our heads. In my unbiased opinion, ours were cuter even with my poor cutting kills. Also, not to be overly critical or prejudiced, but even in my tornado child state, my picture was slightly cuter than that of the little girl pictured here.

  

Update of an Older Post: Yeast Infections, Brine Shrimp, Non Floaters, and Our Delightful Day in the Great Salt Lake

Has nature ever before displayed itself in such splendor? PLEASE don't ask what the object protruding from the "lake" ["cesspool" would be a more fitting description] is, because I haven't a clue and I'd rather not think about it.

Note: this is a slight adjustment of an older post that was lost. 

On one of my family's numerous and more  infamous  trips to Utah, my father decided that an experience every person should have at least once in his or her lifetime was to swim in the Great Salt Lake. This particular trip occurred, I believe, when my brother and I, twins,  were five. The Great Salt Lake's  water contents are  supposedly something like seven times saltier than that of  the Pacific.  Supposedly, according to my dad, the water is so incredibly salty that even a Carnival Cruise ship would not sink in it, which has yet to be proven.

On the afternoon of our journey to the Great Salt Lake, we were mostly in somewhat foul-tempered moods. My mother was  upset because  while we had been at my grandparents' home earlier in the day, my Uncle Mahonri, the known common thief or kleptomaniac of the family (which diagnosis was and is accurate is under debate to this day)  had invaded my mother's suitcase and had helped himself to her Soft and Dri Baby Powder antiperspirant and her cell phone charger. The theft of the antiperspirant angered her more as a matter of principle, but her phone needed a different charger than did my dad's, and we would need to make an unscheduled stop at the SLC Verizon store -- not known for its efficiency -- and would have to shell out whatever ridiculous price was demanded for a new charger. The obvious question may have been  how did we know Mahonri was the one who took the items.  That, however, would be similar to asking after a person decided to invade a hive of bees, then ended up with all sorts of painful red bumps with stingers poking out of them all over his body, if it really was the bees that stung him and not that he came down with chicken pox or a painful case of hives.  Mahonri's prior offences were sufficient to convict him even had there not been  witnesses, and my two-year-old cousin Clarice, very articulate for her age and probably too young to lie about anything so bizarre and specific,  said she saw Mahonri applying my mom's Soft and Dry Baby Powder antiperspirant to his underarms. The phone charger had been seen by another cousin being stuffed into Uncle Mahonri's pocket as he walked out to hi car, supposedly to check his tire pressure, though no one saw him anywhere near the tires.

There's an old proverb on a plaque in one of my relatives' homes that reads, "If Mama Ain't Happy, Ain't No One Happy."  Crudely worded though it might be, it contains an element of truth. When something is really bothering my mom, she tends to pick at all of us until we're all eventually  sniping at each other even though we really have no issue with anyone. It was one of those days. Somehow these unpleasantries seemed to bypass my dad.  He was as cheerful as the rest of us were crabby. As far as he saw it, we were going to have a fabulous day communing with nature by floating in the Great Salt Lake. He whistled as he drove along the freeway leading us there, and even a car cutting him off and nearly causing us to crash into an embankment, which normally would have elicited a string of four-letter-words,  did little to dampen his spirits. "It's just like swimming in bathwater, " my dad proclaimed for something like the hundredth time.

"Maybe like bathwater after ten million brine shrimp have urinated in it," my mom muttered..

"Do brine shrimp bite?" asked my brother, who was genuinely afraid of being bitten by butterflies.

"No," answered my dad.

"Do you know that for a fact?" my mom whispered to him.

"Have you ever heard of a person being bitten by  a brine shrimp?" my dad answered her question with his own question.

"No," my mom answered,, "but then, I don't know very many people who swim in brine shrimp-infested waters."

We drove around for a bit looking for the facility with restrooms where people changed into their swimsuits, and perhaps  food vendor facilities that would also be present. Either we were no the wrong side of the lake or no such facilities existed. We settled for changing into our swimsuits in the car.

"I have to go to the bathroom!" my brother declared immediately upon exiting the car.

"Go in the water," my mom and dad said to him simultaneously."Not much could pollute it beyond what the brine shrimp have already done," my mother added.

 I assume they intended that he would walk into the water until he was maybe waist-deep, then let it flow. My mother looked over to see Matthew standing by the water's edge, appendage pulled out, prepared to add to the fluid contents of the lake.

"Matthew!" my mother exclaimed.

"My father pointed at a small boulder. "Just go behind that rock," my dad told my brother.

As Matthew took care of business, my dad plunged into the salty  almost copper-colored water, leaning back into it.

"You're all paranoid," my dad declared, by this time floating on his back.

My mom stepped in a bit deeper. "If I get a yeast infection from this, " she hissed at my father, "you will pay for it in ways you've never  even imagined."

"What's a yeast infection?" my brother and I asked simultaneously.

"Never mind," my father said, glaring at my mom. He had introduced us to every one of the seven words George Carlin said you can't say on television, plus about a dozen more (we knew them, but we also knew that we dare not say them if we knew what was good for us)  yet he was perturbed that my mom had used the term yeast infection in our presence.

Dad uttered an irritated sigh. "Ocean or natural lake salt actually kills yeast organisms."

"That makes no sense," my mom argued..  "The PH of this lake is probably somewhere around 9."

"And when did you get your license to practice medicine?" my dad asked my mom. (My dad was and is an M.D. My mom holds two doctorates, but hers are  in educational psychology and music performance.) "Was it before we met, and  you just neglected to mention it, or did you somehow manage to sneak it in between everything else you've done since we've been together?"

"Erin," my dad said to my mom  in  a voice he uses when he wants someone to think he's being patient but isn't really feeling patient in the least, "It's a bit of a paradox. Yes, salt water is a base. When it's sea salt, or natural lake salt, it has entirely different properties in water. Sea salt mixed with water is actually a homeopathic cure for a vaginal yeast invention, and is recommended by the medical community as analgesic for yeast vaginitis symptoms."

"It sounds like something you're making up off the top of your head," my mom countered. My mom either thought my brother and I were not looking or didn't care as she gave my dad a prominent display of  her middle finger. He ignored it in his floating bliss.

Mathew slowly waded in until he was maybe thigh-deep, at which time he began to shriek, "I have a leech and it's almost  on my balls!" Matthew had been obsessed with leeches, and particularly about them  attaching themselves to scrotums, ever since having watched a video of Stand by Me when spending the night with older cousins. I don't know what Stand By Me was rated, but I seriously doubt it was G. 

My mother plodded over to Matthew and helped him out of the water. He threw himself onto the beach -- basically hard rock with a half-inch layer of sand covering it -- and flailed around almost like he was pretending to have a tonic/clonic seizure.  (Note: if that pitiful parcel of land was considered a beach, my Little Tykes sandbox at home was the freaking Waikiki.) My mother looked down at her wildly gyrating son, finally locating a thin, roughly inch-long creature just beneath the hem of his swim trunks. She plucked it off, stared at it for a moment,and dismissed it with, "It's a brine shrimp," flinging it as far as she could in the opposite direction of the lake, displaying her true environmental tendencies. (Have you heard that story about the man who saved starfish one at  time by throwing them back into the water? My mother might have been on the beach tossing the poor starfish in the opposite direction in attempt to put them out of their misery more quickly.) "And it's nowhere near your testicles," she said to my brother, who was by this time sitting up and whimpering on the rocky beach.

My mom grabbed towels for herself and my brother, and they began to dry themselves and to rid their bodies of brine shrimp. I saw this as my opportunity to curry favor with my father and to become the shining star of his two children. I can't speak for other twins, but for my brother and myself, when we were children, competition was fierce, as we constantly vied for parental attention and favor. I would be the braver of the two children, who was not deterred by a few, or more accurately a lot of, spiny creatures swimming around in the water. I slogged through the water one low step at a time until I was in almost neck-deep. I leaned back to float, and . . . promptly sank to the bottom of the lake.

Fortunately, we'd been taught to swim an an early age,because no one would ever have located me under that mucky water.  I propelled my arms until I could find my footing, then came up sputtering, with brine shrimp in every cavity in my head. 

"John, you know she doesn't float!" my mother screeched at my father. "I thought you were halfway keeping an eye on her."

"But everyone floats in the Great Salt Lake," my father bemoaned as he helped me remove brine shrimp from my  ears and nose.

"Not Alexis, obviously," my mom contradicted. "You could fill a bathtub half full with salt, fill it the rest of the way with water, and drop her in, and she'd sink.. She has all  the body fat of an El Salvadorian refugee."

My dad walked me out on the water, if you could even call it water. We all de-brine shrimped ourselves the best we could, and climbed into our rental car,which, incidentally, required an additional cleaning fee when it was returned because of all the brine shrimp in the seats and on the floor. 

Our plan had been to spend the night with relatives, but my mom decided she didn't want to risk another encounter with the family kleptomaniac/thief since she'd barely recovered from her last encounter. We checked into a Best Western somewhere in the vicinity of  Springville, Utah. We did a lot of hiking in Provo Canyon wearing our matching San Francisco Giants  jerseys, lessening the chances of disaster were Matthew or I to wander away. 

Even as five-year-olds, my brother and I had the fashion sense to know that siblings or -- even worse -- parents dressing alike was so gauche that it would be less humiliating to be seen in clown costumes or in pocket protectors and glasses with the bridge of the nose wrapped in adhesive tape. We promised to stick with our parents as closely as leeches stick to naughty bulbous parts, but my parents wouldn't relent on the issue. Another time my parents wore matching Giants jerseys to  a San Francisco Giants game. My brother and I walked about twenty paces behind them. We had to sit by them during the game because that's where our seats were, but we spent the entire game pretending not to know them.

My uncle found himself richer by one partially-used can of Soft and Dri spray-on antiperspirant on that fateful day. He also ended up  temporarily with a phone charger, but my grandmother caught him  trying to charge his own cell phone with it when it wouldn't even fit. She'd heard that my mom was missing a charger, so she took it away from him and mailed it to my mom.. My mom still had to buy another one in the meantime, but she did get the original back, so she had one for work and one for home.

confusion between words, names, and diseases

e coli magnified

                                                                         

I needed a prototypical picture of a beautiful dumb blonde, and Alyssa would've killed me (read about what she did to Jared) if I used an actual photo of her.   I don't know this girl, and for all I know, she's a neurosurgeon.

    
                                              

One of Jared's little cousins who lives just under an hour south of here has contracted e coli. She had odd bruises for which her mother could not account, and then developed [ sorry if you're eating] bloody diarrhea.There's nothing pleasant, at least a far as I know, about having a case of e coli, but a mild case is curable, and it appears the little girl has a mild case.  She's in the hospital for precautionary measures and to keep her hydrated, but all signs are that she, who is four years old, will be fine. 

No one really knows for certain how she might have contracted the bacterial  illness. As  far as home-cooked meals, everyone in the family has eaten the same thing, and no one else is sick. The fast food places and restaurants the family has visited are being investigated, but it doesn't appear that there's any sort of epidemic. Still, she could have eaten the one under-cooked burger that escaped detection all year at a given fast food joint. As likely as not, considering the child's age, she  probably failed to wash her hands properly after using the bathroom, and then ate some sort of finger food, but who knows?

Anyway, my friend Alyssa, who is  both Jared's and the sick child's cousin, came back from a short trip to Utah to learn of this, and immediately flew into hysteria. No one present could determine the source of her panic. We're all concerned about little Brooklyn (the poor child's parents have bizarre tastes in names; her five sisters are fortunate not to be named Manhattan, Queens, Staten Island, Bronx, or maybe even Bedford-Stuyvesant or Hell's Kitchen), but the situation appears to be under control. She's anemic, but not dangerously so, and her kidneys are functioning well. She's in the hospital so that she can be monitored, hydrated, and given antibiotics by IV. If things go as expected, Brooklyn will be released in a few days.

Alyssa was literally weeping over what she perceived as the laissez-faire attitude the rest of us had regarding Brooklyn's illness. She asked, "What is the survival rate of this illness, anyway? What are the chances that she could die?"

Jared responded with, "What are the chances that any of us could die, Alyssa? I could walk out the door and be hit by a car while I'm crossing the street. Or maybe I don't even have to walk out the door. Maybe a drunk-driver or an old person could drive right through the living room wall any second." He probably picked that up from the Everybody Loves Raymond episode when Frank crashed into Ray and Deborah's living room.

Without really thinking, I moved away from the wall that was closest to the street. Jared noticed and laughed at me.

Alyssa became enraged and hit Jared's face so hard with a sofa cushion  that it caused a his nose to bleed. "I'm sorry!" she shrieked. "I meant to hurt you, but I didn't intend to draw blood."

"Don't worry about it," he told her as he used his T-shirt to soak up the carnage.

I ran for a roll of paper towels because I didn't want to deal with my mother's umbrage over Jared's blood, or anyone's blood, for that matter, tainting her living room. No one enters the room in an unclean state [my mom is nearly as anal as the Saducees of the Old Testament], no one eats in the room, and certainly no one bleeds  there.  I handed paper towels to Jared, then suggested that we move the discussion into the family room, where a drop of blood might elicit a question or two but not utter mania.  As we were moving to the family room, a light bulb went off in my brother's head.

"Alyssa," Matthew asked her, "What do you know about e coli?"

"What everybody knows," Alyssa answered. "It's in Africa, and people are dying over there with it because there's no cure. The [Mormon] missionaries are being moved out if Liberia and somewhere else for their own safety because the area has been so hard-hit. They're bringing two Americans back to the U.S. to treat them, and it's stirring up all sorts of worry because now the disease will be on the American continent." She paused.  "And now Brooklyn has it right here in California!"

Jared was sitting [bare-chested because I'd thrown his shirt in the washing machine because of the blood on it, and no one in my house owns any shirt that would come close to fitting his 6' 6" frame] with his elbows on his knees and his huge hands covering his face. He was laughing so hard that I could tell he was crying, but didn't want the rest of us to see the tears streaming down his face. (Their family cries a lot, whatever the reason.) Matthew was laughing openly.

"My cousin is dying, and you troglodytes for some reason think it's  funny!" Alyssa stormed out of the family room and into the bathroom, slamming the door and locking it behind her. I followed her. I could hear that she wasn't using the bathroom for personal business, so I reached for a paper clip in the drawer under the kitchen counter and unlocked the bathroom door. (It's a highly secure lock.) 

Matthew grabbed Alyssa's arm and pulled her back into the family room. Jared had no intention of letting her anywhere near him after she'd bloodied his nose with the sofa cushion. Matthew sat her down on a love seat away from Jared.  He pulled an ottoman up to her so that he was directly facing her. "Alyssa,"  he explained, "the disease you're thinking of - the deadly virus that's decimating parts of Africa, is the ebola virus, NOT  e coli.  Brooklyn'll be out of the hospital in a couple of days and probably back to  normal in less than a month."

"So she doesn't have that illness that's killing all the Africans?" she asked.

"No!" we all answered in unison.

"Never mind, then," she said cheerily as she jumped up and hurried back into my parents'  living room to play the Steinway that sits  there. The rest of us just shook our heads. The scary thing was that until the end of the last quarter, she was a pre-nursing major. 

She's changed her major to English, and plans to become a paralegal. We can only hope that she obtains a better grasp of the principles of law than she has of the most very basic medical terminology. Depending upon the agency for whom she works, because of her ineptitude, guilty people will walk the streets, patents will be sought for products for which they already have been granted, or documents will be misread to the extent that lawsuits which should have prevailed will be lost and vice versa, but presumably at least no one will die as a result of of her perpetual state of confusion.


                  

   Today's lesson, which most of you have learned eons ago::

                  e coli  ≠  ebola

Note: I am  not poking fun at the ebola virus or at anyone who suffers from it, nor would I ever do so.. I am, however, making mirth at the expense of Alyssa's obtuseness.

creative cheating, musical fingernails, and matters both related and unrelated

To cheat, or not to cheat: that is the question.

My friend came and redid my finger and toenails the way I wanted them done. We went with a black base and white notation this time.  

Another friend, who is a voice major, came over while we were doing my nails. She told us of a student in her program who's not the sharpest Crayola even in the eight-pack, but is turning cheating into an art form. She always has musical notation on her fingernails, so it doesn't catch any professor's attention when she comes in on test days with notation all over her fingernails. if the exam features melodic minor scales, she puts the one that is most difficult on her nails, then uses it as a base to figure out the rest.  If the test is on modes, she puts the one or two most difficult modes on her nails.

My friend is too kind. At first, the girl was having the notes painted on so that they would be visible in context to others, and was continually having to turn her hands so that her nails were facing her. After class, she suggested to the girl that the person doing her nails should do the notes upside down so that she could visualize the content without drawing attention to herself by continually turning her hands so that she could stare at her nails. I would have left her to wallow in her ignorance -- creative ignorance, but ignorance just the same.

My mom took a Polynesian music course where attendance wasn't a factor in grading, and it was a mid-sized auditorium-style class, so the professor had no clue who was there and who wasn't on a regular basis. My mom's main purpose for taking the course,  in addition to the fact that she needed the credit for her music major, was to learn to play the ukulele, but her ukulele  broke  at the end of the first week of class. The bridge and saddle came unglued. The school bookstore from which she bought it refused to replace it, and she couldn't afford another. My mom attended maybe one session out of each six
.  
The tests for the class consisted  almost exclusively of two things: placing chord names in the blanks where they were provided above the words of songs, and diagramming ukulele chords on lines provided to simulate strings. Students were expected to have their ukuleles at all classes,including at test sessions.  They were allowed and even encouraged  to use their ukuleles for help in remembering the chords to the Polynesian songs.

My mom's once-every-two-weeks attendance was sufficient for her to learn a couple of the songs, and if she knew what they sounded like, she knew what chords belonged where. You can's learn every song by attending one session out of six, though. (The written course materials provided only words to songs, and no music notation.That's where it became creative.  Showing up once every two weeks was often enough that my mom knew which of the other students knew the content of the course. She'd sit near -- but not too near --  one of them. They'd usually play through the songs in the order they were on the test, and even if they didn't, she could discern it and adjust. Basically, my mom took dictation of every chord that was played, wrote it  all in the little spaces, and aced those portions of the tests.

The chord diagramming was a breeze for her. they used the C6 form of tuning (there are apparently more ways than one to tune a ukulele). This is the "my dog has fleas"  formation. with high g, C, E, and A being the pitches to which one would tune the strings.  Those are the notes that sound, if tuned properly, when no strings are pressed down. The pitch is raised by one half-tone with each fret, starting from the end near the knobs. If you wanted a d chord, you just figure out how many frets need to be moved over so that all the tones of the D chord are represented and every string produces a tone in the d chord. it's not exactly rocket science if you have any music fundamental in your background.  

My parents have argued extensively over whether or not what my mom did constituted cheating. My dad says she certainly wasn't doing her own work. My mom said that she NEVER looked at anyone else's paper, and never brought in cheat sheets, whether on her fingernails or in  any other form. My aunt, who is also a music major, said she had to work hard to get to the point that she could recognize chords son easily. I  say it's a moot point because it was all the fault of the bookstore manager who wouldn't replace her defective ukulele.

Incidentally, the first year they were married, when they had maybe enough money to eat ramen noodles on a good night,  for her birthday my dad gave my mom a ukulele that someone he knew didn't want any longer. She now knows how to play the ukulele.

fingernails and forcing your kid to play the piano

                                            

This is not exactly what i had in mind -- I want something more systematic -- but you can get the overall idea. I'm not sure if I want white on black or black on white.

                                            

I'm still house-bound until Tuesday.  The sheer boredom has caused me to call a friend more talented than I at such things and to have her paint my fingernails the  colors of the rainbow, ascending and descending. After a day, that didn't do much for me, so I called her back and asked her to paint a piano keyboard, which is easy, but it's not just alternating black and white. If you start on C, that of course is white. C-sharp, then must be black. D is white, D-sharp is black. The next two notes -- F and G -- are white, Then  /F-sharp is black G is white. G-sharp is black. A is white. Then you have to switch to toes, starting with black for A-sharp. B is white. C is also white. I think you get it.

I am, however, getting tired of that look. I think tomorrow i'll have her paint music staves on each of my nails. Then she can put the clef signs, sharps, and  notes to compose an ascending A-major scales starting with my toes. This is going to require some serious fine motor skill on her part. That's one reason I'm doing this: to help her improve her fine motor skills. It's not all about me.

If I were a serious trust fund baby, as in one who never had to worry in the least about where my next meal or car or home was coming from, I would study in great depth musicology,  kinesiology and motor learning. I would study whether or not the standard piano/organ/harpsichord et al keyboards are really optimal for ease of use. If not, I would work to design one that was more utilitarian. It seems unlikely that there's a better way of doing it, but I don't know if it's really been investigated. I've researched, and I can't find evidence of any such study.

The original typewriter had keys arranged in order from A to Z. which would seem to make sense. The problem with the arrangement and with the original manual typewriter was that those who mastered it soon learned to type at a speed greater than the manual typewriter could accommodate, which jammed up the keys.The letters were scrambled a bit to slow the fastest typists.  I've wondered about whether computer keyboards, once technology really took over and the products were of high calibre, should have been reconfigured with an A to Z format.  Today's computers, it would seem, could accommodate the accelerated speed of typists who mastered the skill with the alphabetically aligned keyboards.  And it's not as though it would interfere in most cases with a person's ability to use a standard typewriter, since relatively few of us will ever need to use a standard. typewriter. The problem is all i in the changeover.and conversion. It's like metrics. Most of us probably agree that the metric system is a superior method of measurement, but change can be tough for most of us.

On the other hand, even if I  came up with a new and improved keyboard that I could prove would be easier to master and I possessed sufficient power and influence that anyone of importance would listen to anything I had to say, I'm not sure I'd push it and try to convince a piano manufacturer to make the new, more utilitarian piano.  Then we'd have two types of pianos. Even if my new method took off,, which is highly dubious, a pianist would walk into a facility not knowing if the piano was the type he or she had been trained to play. A person could learn both, but it would not be beneficial to the pianist at least in terms of piano skills (though it might perhaps be a tremendous exercise for the brain) to learn both, and would cause needless confusion.  To use a motor learning term, it would create what is known as  negative transfer. The acquisition of certain skills can actually impede the acquisition of  different skills. For example, the heavy wrist action in badminton  makes the proper grip and handling of a tennis racquet more difficult to master, for example.

In terms of note names, if I could reconfigure the present piano, I would start on the note C and not on A, but I would call it A. The key signature with no flats and sharps would be A. E would be the key with one sharp. B would be the key with two sharps, etc, etc, ad nauseum. I think it makes more sense than the present way it's done, although it's already been done and it's much too late to undo it. We're stuck with the present system. Anyone who's really smart enough or enough of a savant to learn to play the piano can do so under the present system.

It exasperates  me when I see pianos that have been defaced by people who have put colored stickers or markings from permanent markers on piano keys in order to create for a student a shortcut to learning notes, both on staves and on the keyboard. This is nothing more than teaching by the rote method. Students who learn anything by the rote method learn nothing more than that one thing that was taught. They've learned nothing that can transfer to further musical learning. If that's the goal, just teach the child or person a song note by note; then at least a  piano isn't being vandalized in the process.  .

I am not, unfortunately, a serious trust fund baby, or at least not one who won't have to worry about supporting herself financially for the duration of her adult life.  My grandmother may leave me ten or twenty thousand dollars, which would be very nice of her if it actually happens, but I won;'t inherit anything that is lifestyle-altering..So, unless in some alternate universe someone has the same thoughts I have, the configuration of both the piano itself and of the musical notation system is likely to remain the same as is presently constituted.   It's probably the very least of anyone's problems anyway.

Playing piano is a dying art. When my oldest aunts and uncles on my mom's side, who are in their early sixties, were children, probably half of everyone who could afford to do so took piano lessons. Most homes had clunker pianos, and when children reached the second grade in most cases [ for some reason that seemed to be the standard age at which people started their children in piano instruction] children would head off to a neighborhood piano teacher. It often didn't take. My mom says studies indicate that of those who studied piano as children in the fifties through the early seventies, maybe one in five stuck with it long enough to still play anything all as an adult, and roughly one in ten actually developed and maintained reasonable skill at it.

In many cases, the parents had made a financial sacrifice to obtain the piano even if  was an old clunker,and then there was the price of the lessons,  and they expected their children to stick with the activity for long enough that they felt their initial investment  was not a total waste.

Playing the piano is, maybe more that most instruments, fun at first, as you can get a non-cacophonous sound from the keys just by touching them. Such isn't necessarily the case with many other instrument, with the French horn or violin. being good examples. So piano instruction usually starts out to be a very positive thing. Then the piano student reaches a point where no further progress can be made until the notes on the page are learned. Learning the notes on the keyboard isn't usually too cumbersome a skill, but learning the notation can be a chore when there are other things a child might rather be doing. If the student will stick with the task and learn those notes on the page -- the bass clef notes usually present the greatest challenge, as in early piano music, the melody is usually in the treble clef, and the student spends more time playing those notes -- piano will very soon become fun again,  much more fun than it was in the first place.  Finger coordination will still be an issue, and learning to read rhythms correctly can hold students back as well, but if he or she masters the treble and particularly the bass clef notation, chances are the student will be a pianist for life.'

Playing piano comes more easily to some people that to others. Having an ear for music, while it won't help you to learn to read the notes, will help you to know when the notes you're playing are correct or incorrect.  it may also help you to learn to play by ear. Even if you can play by ear, it's a good idea to learn to read music as well, because if you play exclusively by ear, you're always dependent upon someone else's interpretation of a melody and can never get your inspiration from the primary source. Still, it''s a lovely skill to have. I play by ear probably more than I play using printed music now.  Being smarter than average helps when it comes to playing the piano. There's a system, and smart people typically master it more easily than slower people do.  

Left-handers have an advantage in learning the piano. It's not a huge advantage, but it's measurable. Most people who have received several years of  piano instruction can, using music, pluck out the right hand of any given piece if it's not terribly difficult. If you ask them either to put the left hand with it or to play the left  hand part by itself, often they can't. If a person has a naturally more coordinated left hand, it will help. He or she will learn the right hand. It's the left hand and lack of familiarity with bass clef that holds most students back.

Similarly, if a student waits until he or she has received music instruction on another instrument other than piano before attempting piano, the student will have more success if the instrument he or she payed was a bass clef instrument. The right hand and treble clef naturally gets more work because the melody of simple songs are usually written in the treble clef and right hand.  It's the bass clef and left hand that seldom get enough extra practice.

Any student who really wants to learn to play the piano probably can do so. It's simply a matter of practicing and working through that  time period when it's not a whole lot of  fun. A good piano teacher can motivate students through this period by trying to find musical selections the student really wants to learn to play.(Choose a piano teacher wisely. It can make all the difference in the world.The teacher obviously needs a thorough command of the piano and of music in general, but the person also needs the ability to make playing the piano as much fun as possible.)   Still, there is some drudgery involved. Today's parents aren't accustomed to making their children stick with an activity once it's no longer fin for the child.  Giving in too early is doing the child a grave disservice, or  if you're an adult and you quit once you reach the hurdle of not knowing your notes well and you quit, you're doing yourself a grave disservice.  use flashcards or just practice a little harder and your child or you can work through the rough time.

Practice time is another myth. Most people grew up thinking an hour a day was the absolute minimum time of practice on the piano ion ordby theer to master the instrument. To become truly proficient, at some point a pianist will need to put in that much time and more, but in the early stages, Quality matters more than quantity. If a child puts in two intensive fifteen minute practice sessions a day for the first year, he or she can probably master what needs to be learned, The second year an extra five minute per session should be add, and an at least additional five for the third year. A parent or adult needs to monitor the practice session to some degree. If the child is playing songs he or she learned from God knows where or songs he's mastered weeks ago instead of what has been assigned for the current lesson, the practice is of limited benefit. in some cases, rather than setting a time limit, a student can be asked to play each assigned piece X number of times per day. If the child is young or not very reliable, the parent will probably need to monitor to ensure that it actually happens.

If  a parent follows these practices diligently for two years, by year three the parent may have a child who is self-motivated, or at least in need of less supervision. In terms of time, a child does not need to give up other activities in order to practice and master the piano. It may cut into TV and video game time, but i that really such a bad thing? 

Kidney Stones, Show-and-Tell, and Prude Nuns



classic calcium oxalate kidney stones -- the boring ones of my mom's that my brother has == though magnified; Matthew's collection has one significantly larger than the larger of these two, which is considered unusual

My mom has another kidney stone, or, more properly, urinary calculus. I believe this one's midway through her ureter.  It hurts her a lot and makes her a rather unpleasant  person with whom to live. Fortunately, or maybe anyway, she usually passes them without surgical or laser intervention. I qualify that as possibly being a good thing because it means the doctors usually have her tough it out since she theoretically CAN pass them, as opposed to blasting them to smithereens and just getting rid of them. She says if this one goes on much longer, she's going to use my dads influence and  insist on a procedure because she's tired of it and literally sick of it.  

Doing such, I suppose, is similar to pulling rank in terms of one's husband's influence to have a Caesarean delivery rather than  toughing  it out though labor and then having all sorts of unpleasant procedures done in body areas most of us would rather not even think about while having a creature roughly the size of  a baby walrus pulled out of one's girl parts, in view of an audience probably larger than what you'd see at an average LPGA  tournament.

I don't blame my mom in the least for letting a bit of nepotism help her get rid of this urinary calculus faster. She's paid  her dues. I have no idea how many stones she's passed. Pseudoaunt has them frequently as well, but not nearly as many as my mom has had. My brother and I used to amuse ourselves by naming them when we were little, but we eventually ran out of  respectable names, sort of as the Duggars ran out of decent names for their actual children about four kids ago  if not even earlier.

With my mom's first few calculi, which happened before my brother and I were born, the stones were sent to labs for analysis. After five or six or so went through lab analysis, and especially because they all looked a great deal  alike,  it became obvious that they were all calcium oxalate in composition, and it was pointless to devote any more resources to analyzing them.

It was at that point that my brother decided he should start an official collection.  My dad found a plexiglass case about 12 inches by eight inches by 1.5 inches. Matthew would use 2-sided tape to secure the calculi to the bottom of the container. As the stones grew more numerous, they were placed closer together.  My dad snapped the lid on very tightly so that only he could get it off because he didn't want one of Matthew's friends trying to steal my mom's kidneys stones to sell them on ebay. Matthew had friends who would have done such a thing.  That does make me curious. As soon as I finish this blog, I'm going to check out ebay and see if any kidney stones are up for bids.

When my brother and I were in second grade, Matthew took his collection of my mother's kidney stones to school for Show-and-Tell. The kids were fascinated  ("She peed those things out? Are you serious?") but the teacher -- one of two nuns on staff at our Catholic school -- was less impressed, even grossed out, to the point that she wrapped the case in butcher paper so she wouldn't have to look at the offensive calculi anymore.  She attached a note informing my parents that the kidney stone collection was a most inappropriate show-and-tell entry and that she would appreciate it if they would keep it at home in the future. My dad couldn't figure out what was so freaking inappropriate about it, especially since we told him that the teacher had no problem with  Debbie Wilson bringing her brother's spare glass eye in a jar (I still occasionally have nightmares about the thing) to show the class. My dad considered calling the teacher to ask her to clarify her Show-and-Tell policy, but my mom told him to let it go.  She said Karma has a way of biting people in the butt, or in this case, in he kidneys, and with any luck,  Sister Edith of Polesworth, at the rate she consumed coffee and diet Pepsi,  would herself experience all the glory that accompanies passing a kidney stone sometime very soon.

Matthew still has the collection. He's hoping my mom passes this stone naturally, because if it's blasted to bits with the lithotripsy gun, there won't be enough left for his collection. My guess is that he thinks he's going to get some sort of extra credit in  some medical school class for bringing in a case of kidney stones. I suppose it's not beyond possibility, but he has a problem. My mom's stones are all calcium oxalate. If I find a whole variety of stones of different compositions on ebay, my kidney stone collection will trump 9I know that's a swear word that I just used, but consider the context and give me a pass, please) his even with the most sexist professor on the planet. I still don't know if you can buy the things on ebay, though. Anyone have any spare kidney stones for sale?