Reproductivity, Family Trees, and Stupidity

My family tree is far more convoluted than is this piteous stock illustration.

My newest cousin has a name, Kensington Malia, though the name won't be considered "official" until the child is blessed in the Church. If her father screws it up in the blessing ceremony, the name will have to be changed on the birth certificate. Don't scoff, as it's happened before. Kensington Malia. I'll leave readers guessing as to whether "Kensington" is one of the few real cousin names I've posted, or if, as in a case of most of the cousins I've listed, it's a para-wording of the actual name.

It seems that I wrote prematurely, or at least incorrectly, when I suggested that Kensington was likely to be my final first cousin. Another aunt is pregnant again. I won't even go to the pretense of suggesting that this cousin-to-be is the final installment in this generation of the family. God only knows how many more babies my rabbit-like aunts will squeeze out, and I'm not sure even God knows. He (or She) is probably throwing  His (or Her) hands in the air in disbelief even as I type these words.

I tallied my cousins just because I needed something to occupy my mind for a moment while a professor was lecturing abut something that was making me queasy. On my mom's side I have a total of nineteen cousins. On my dad's side, I currently have sixty-five cousins. (One cousin, William, was born after I compiled the list of cousins on my dad's side.) If nature proceeds as planned, although I highly doubt this blessed event was ever planned, the grand total will expand to sixty-six. (Eighty-five will be the collective total of first first cousins for me.) Only time will tell in regard to the finality of this number. For the record, the next generation is moving along in oyster-like fashion. (Oysters are among the most prolific of breeders of complex organisms, even more so than rabbits.)

Last night my brother was pondering aloud concerning the reasons for my fathers' siblings fecundity. The possible reasons may vary from one couple to the next. My father is one of ten surviving offspring, so he and his siblings have a head start in terms of filling up an entire republican caucus with just their own seed. Four of the ten had only two surviving children each, but the remaining six more than made up for their siblings' reproductive slacking. The reasons I have so many cousins on my dad's side, according to my brother -- and for once he's not totally out in right field and actually has a bit of a grasp of the reality of the circumstances -- are varied. 

Some of my aunts and uncles have large families because they feel that it's what God and the Church expect of them. Birth control has never been officially banned for Mormons, although some members of the LDS faith have interpreted various words of caution from church leaders against limiting family size as a de facto prohibition of artificial methods of birth control. Even among those who don't consider birth control to be against the Church's teachings, the prevailing belief is that God wants LDS couples to have as many children as they can support without risking the health of the mother. (Risking the health of the mother is a subjectively-defined term. To the most ignorant LDS adherents, if conception alone doesn't risk the mother's life, it's considered a safe undertking.) Among some members of the faith and certainly in some branches of my family, children are seen as empirical data supporting evidence of their parents' righteousness. 

It seems worth noting that the reigning LDS Prophet, Seer, and Revelator, Thomas S. Monson, and his late wife Frances, had only three children. My best guess without actually being privy to any inside information would be that the late Mrs. Monson probably delivered her children via Caesarean section in the days of lengthy vertical incisions, when three was usually the highest number of such deliveries recommended most doctors.

Others of my aunts and uncles may like sex. Some may be too inept to use birth control effectively. In other cases, they may be too lazy to use birth control effectively. Regardless of the underlying cause for the failure to implement birth control, the effect is the same: too many offspring.

Matthew threw this last possible reason for having a large number of children for entirely theoretical or academic purposes. Some people have many children because they genuinely enjoy children. There's absolutely no evidence whatsoever that it applies in the instances of my father's siblings who have large numbers of children. The only members of my father's family (other than his mother) who actually like children are the ones who had only two children. It's possible that this phenomenon -- the actual liking of children by those who have only two children -- may actually be an effect rather than a cause. Such certainly makes sense, as it's easier to enjoy children if one doesn't have to clear a path or risk stepping on half a dozen of them every time one needs to use the bathroom.

Matthew shared something in class today about the birth of our sixty-fifth cousin on my dad's side. This led to an extensive discussion (irritating me somewhat, because I'm paying for my education, and I don't need to waste lecture time for which I've paid by talking about how many cousins I have). No one in the cohort has as many cousins as Matthew and I do. I know sixty-five is not a world, national, or even local record. With high birth rate being prevalent among Mormons,  there would likely be numerous LDS families who would edge past our family in terms of sheer numbers. For one thing, there were four reproductive slouches in my dad's family of ten children. Sometimes the original families have zero slouches. 

Most of my cousins on my dad's side have even more cousins than I do. Most of them are LDS on both sides, and while the numbers of cousins on the other sides of their families don't necessarily reach the sixties, they do quite possibly reach the forties. They have fewer cousins on my side than I do, because some of those large nuclear families I count as cousins are siblings to them. Still, their overall numbers of cousins may be close to or even in excess of one hundred.

Then again, my number of cousins is probably close to the 99th percentile ranking. If you look at a family such as the Duggars, it wouldn't take very many families of nineteen to overtake my dad's family. I don't think either Jim Bob's or Michelle's siblings have contributed enough collective spawn to their litters of cousins to overtake us. Most likely Jim Bob's children will reproduce enough offspring to best my generation of cousins in the population war, as will their friends the Bates family and some of the other Quiverfull Movement fundies.

Several times my large number of cousins has come up in discussions. Usually people just scratch their heads at the insanity of it. Once in awhile someone will insist in response that they have at least as many cousins as I do. (In some of these cases, people are counting step-siblings and live-in pseudo-siblings from several different relationships. It's not the same thing. If someone was neither born nor legally adopted into a family, they don't count in the total of cousins. Furthermore, it's not a contest any intelligent person would desire to win. Sometimes less is more.) In some cases the ones professing to have more first cousins than I are people I actually know, and I know their estimated numbers to be wildly inaccurate. I could ask  them to actually count their cousins, but I let it go. If they really want to believe that their extended family is even more stupid than mine is, they are free to bask in their mistaken ignorance with my blessing.

Taking the Good and the Bad: Sitcom Purgatory

Lisa Whelchel as Blair Warner

I took the headache drugs at about 5:00 a.m. after I sent my brother to pick them up.After that, I slept for more than nine straight hours. Then I woke up and studied until about an hour ago. i'm still not sleepy after having been unconscious for the entire morning and then some, so i'm curled up in bed with my kitty, watching mindless TV.

I'm watching, of all things, a  The Facts of Life marathon on TV. I had  the channel on for something else when my remote control batter apparently died.I like Charlotte Rae but thing the show is quite lame. I could turn the television off manually but I cannot change the Direct TV channel without the remote on the TV in my room.

The Facts of Life 's target audience must have the pre-adolescent demographic group, as hardly anyone much older or smarter could have tolerated the mediocre-at-best writing and even poorer acting. The plots were inane, and the characters were neither relatable nor likable. 

"Blair Warner," the token hottie among the group of girls in the sitcom, is particularly hard to swallow in her designated persona. I didn't find the actress who portrayed her -- Lisa Whelchel -- to be attractive in the first place, and whoever it was who colored her hair was roughly as lacking in skill in that department as I would have been if I had been the person doing her hair. Not everyone has a stylist as talented as my friend Alyssa, but one would think a TV show could have afforded to pay someone with a the skills of the average cosmetology school dropout, or, that failing, that the actress herself would have sprung for the cost of a decent coloring job. The color is brassy  and the roots are horrendous. The show was presumably filmed before hair weaves were stylish. Still, the character "Blair" was supposedly to have been from a very wealthy family. She should not have looked as though she picked up a cheap packet of L'Oreal hair coloring from a shelf at Target and applied it herself without the assitance of even a mirror.

I'm reluctant to complete the expression of my thoughts in relation to Lisa Whelchel and her portrayal of "Blair Warner," but, at the risk of coming across as petty or unkind, I will put my thoughts into words here. Lisa Whelchel appeared to have gained a bit of weight not long after being cast as "Blair" in The Facts of Life.  As females proceed through adolescence, weight gain is as often as not a normal component of the transition from girlhood to womanhood.. Sometimes when actresses gain weight during the courses of television series, the actresses' roles are written out or the actresses are replaced with other actresses who are not experiencing weight issues, or at least not experiencing weight issues visible to the camera. In other instances, the situation is addressed in the plot itself in the form of lines being written into the dialogue in which the character, and, by extension, the actress herself, is the butt of fat jokes and cruel weight gain comments. Adolescence is a time of emotional vulnerability, and practices of the sort have had devastating effects on the development of actresses unfortunate enough to have been on the receiving end of such treatment. Google "Tracey Gold" for specifics of an especially harrowing example of Hollywood's handling of a young woman's body going through the normal maturation process.

To the best of my knowledge, Lisa Whelchel was not subjected to any of the aforementioned tactics. It might have been that Charlotte Rae,  considered to have been cast in a sitcom role somewhat beneath her stature as an eminent entertainer, would not have stood for handling of a young actress's weight gain in such a callous manner. Or perhaps the producers of the sitcom had consciences. Whatever the circumstances were, it would seem that Lisa Whelchel didn't suffer the same psychologically abusive fate as did some of her contemporaries. If my presumptions are correct, Whelchel's situation was dealt with in a sensitive and humane manner. For that I'm grateful.

On the other hand, pretending that Whelchel was a complete bombshell was, in its own way, an error in the opposite direction.  The show's producers could have steered the writers away from plot lines making reference to the consummate hotness of the character of Blair. If an absolute knockout had been essential to the show's chemistry, another character might have been added. Or not. I'm not sure such a character was essential. What I'm trying to communicate is that the show's producers, in a way, set Whelchel up for ridicule by highlighting her as some sort of sex symbol when she was clearly not perceived as suh by most of the viewers in TV Land. In essence, the show's production staff did the wrong thing for all the right reasons.

I'm unaware of how much if at all Lisa Whelchel continued to act after The Facts of Life. She did, however, go on to to a career as a fundamentalist Christian motivational speaker and as an author of slightly [presumably unintentionally] kinky parenting books about disciplining children by, among other things, putting hot sauce in their mouths. Jessica Beagley, the Mormon mom of Dr. Phil fame, did not invent the "let hot sauce be a tool in your disciplinary arsenal" child-rearing strategy.

                                           I don't own this video.

Headaches, New Cousins, and Associated Bullshit

me right now except that she doesn't look much like me

One of our lecture sessions today (technically yesterday, but Wednesday hasn't yet begun in my world because I haven't gone to bed yet) focused on the topic of headaches. This was most ironic for me, as I was at the same time experiencing the mother of all headaches. Having to listen to the pathological causes of headaches while laboring in vain not to toss the contents of my stomach was most interesting. I did manage to hurl into trash cans outside the lecture hall, which was a moral victory of sorts.

So far I've been fighting the headache with over-the-counter and homeopathic remedies and with acupressure. The score thus far is headache: 3, Over-the-Counter and Homeopathic Remedies and Acupressure: 0. I will soon throw in the towel on Tuesday and go to bed. If the headache is still with me when I arise, i will resort to more potent drugs. There are five MDs living within one-hundred yards of me. I've babysat the children of three of the MDs (free of charge, no less), and I've dated the fourth. (The fifth one probably couldn't pick me out of a police line-up, so I won't solicit drugs from her.) The drugs are as good as in my hand. If I had a known or suspected chemical or psychological dependency, the doctors living around me might not be so quick to hand them out, but I don't,  so they will be.

I'm a cousin again for roughly the ninetieth time. I should know the exact count, but I confess to not keeping a running tally in my head. This is quite likely my final first cousin, as my dad's sister Cristelle, the only aunt still realistically young enough to safely produce children, has called a moratorium on childbirth after just two babies. The newest cousin is from an aunt who is forty-four. The child, or so we've been told anyway, does not have Down Syndrome.   This baby has not yet been named. I'll share the name with you as soon as I'm informed of it.

In an earlier blog I shared the names of my cousins on my dad's side. As you probably surmised, in the interest of anonymity, I changed the names of most of my cousins. I left a few intact, but I created most of the names based on the style the parents used for their children's actual names. If alliteration was a theme employed by parents, I chose another letter for the same alliterative effect. If church history was a prevailing theme, I switched to similar names prominent in LDS history. If a continent was used as a name, I substituted another continent, and if the child with a continent for a first name had a dessert for a middle name, I substituted another dessert.  I think you probably understand my code. 

Tomorrow I have no classes and Matthew has only one. i took all of my scholarly concentration courses in the two preceding quarters. Matthew has only one of his scholarly concentration courses remaining. Most of our cohort mates are burdened with two our three of the electives. It was a major pain in the glutes to have taken them earlier, but tomorrow I'll be studying in bed if my headache has gone away, and I'll be sleeping off whatever drug I've taken to combat the headache if the headache has chosen to stick around for another day. Either choice is preferable to once again dragging myself to class and tossing my cookies into trash receptacles. Being future-oriented does occasionally have its benefits.

P.S. I texted the MD I used to date to tell him I had a killer headache. He's dropping off a prescription for migraine-specific meds along with a script for Vitamin V (which can no longer be phoned in) at the local 24-hour pharmacy in a few minutes so that he can go to sleep when he gets off his 36-hour shift without being woken up by me. One should not really want any prescription for a drug that may be needed ASAP to be buried under all the others that were faxed in, anyway. 

Return Trip, Accidental Terrorism, and Bundys Up to Their Usual Nonsense

Ammon Bundy, who is currently involved in an unauthorized occupation of a federal wildlife reserve building in Oregon

My brother and I made it back to our condo safely. Each of us had our own car, but we traveled in a two-car caravan to placate my mother. We encountered a bit of weather Had Matthew been traveling solo he would almost certainly have arrived home significantly earlier, but I refuse to drive as fast as he does when left to his own devices We encountered just a bit of weather near then end of the trip, but it wasn't severe enough to be scary.

I'm in the middle of a book, so I had to finish it before getting to bed. I'm reading The Accidental Terrorist: Confessions of a Reluctant Missionary by William Shunn. In his first-person account, Shunn tells the story of his experience as an LDS missionary, the acme of which would surely have been his admittedly ill-advised decision to telephone a pretend bomb threat to an airline in order to delay a flight, thereby preventing a fellow missionary from defecting from the mission force before LDS officials could arrive in attempt to dissuade the young man from leaving prior to his originally-scheduled release. Knotty blogged about the book recently, and I remembered having read it quite some time ago. I have no clue as to where my original copy might now be, so I reordered a copy -- this time an electronic version.

I greatly enjoyed Shunn's story, but I found his retelling of the early history of the LDS church to be rather tiresome.  Shunn is an engaging writer, and I understood how seamlessly the early history of Joseph Smith story wove into Shunn's own narrative, but I've heard almost all of the LDS lore so many times that I found myself scanning ahead through the LDS history to wherever Shunn's own tale resumed. Regardless, it's an entertaining read, and I highly recommend it.

At least two of the sons of Cliven Bundy -- an LDS rancher and second amendment enthusiast who took part in a much-publicized dispute with the federal government in 2015 over the right (or lack thereof) to allow his cattle to graze free of charge on federal land -- have, along with some members of a local militia,  occupied a federal wildlife refuge. While I recognize the rectitude of being more respectful than I typically am of the rights of others to hold beliefs that aren't  in line with my own, I hope that this most recent act of civil disobedience on the part of members of the extended Bundy family is causing some of those who aligned with them in their previous controversy to re-think the advisability of supporting such anarchy.  

New Years' Resolutions and Other Bullshit

This is not actually Alexis, by the way, though such is already painfully obvious to all. I can only wish I had such a nice figure.

Happy New Year, Feliz  Ano Nuevo, Bonne Annee, Gong Hay Fat Choy, Gong Zi Fa Cai, or however you most like to say or hear it. 

New Year's resolutions are something that I consider a waste of time. For the most part, if a person needs to change something about himself or herself, what is the point of waiting until the next January 1 to begin to address it? Do it now! Perhaps a modification in a person's financial practices is considered, such as making a decision to be more careful and systematic in saving receipts. Maybe the idea occurs to a person too late in a given calendar year for it to make an appreciable difference in that year, but making the change would create a tangible benefit if it were done for an entire year or at least for the better part of a year. A rationale for postponing the change until the onset of the next calendar year might then conceivably make sense. Otherwise it's an exercise in absurdity.  If a change is important enough to make, anyone who is sufficiently committed to make whatever change has been proposed after January 1 would do so if he or she decided to immediately [or very next day at the absolute latest] effect the change. 

I had a very quiet New Year's Eve / New Year celebration. I spent it at my pseudo-relatives' condo in the mountains of Utah. My original plan had been to spend the days between Christmas and New Year's Day in the Beehive State, but plans changed for all of my prospective travel companions. I didn't want to go there all by myself Then my aunt called and said their family was  chartering a flight for a three-day trip to Utah. I chose to go with them. Once there, I managed to squeeze about twenty hours of skiing and snowboarding into three days. The time there was an almost perfect interval -- just enough time on the slopes to have made the plane trip worth my while, and then as I was beginning to feel most fortunate that I normally live in parts of California that have mild climates, it was time to board the plane again and to return to California.

I seriously considered enrolling in a medical school in a location further north and with harsher winters even than those typically experienced in most parts of Utah. Think The Great White North if you need more specifics to create a picture in your mind. In what was probably a fortunate turn of events for me, the day I flew there for the interview, the area was hit with a winter storm so harsh that it could have stranded me there for a week. as I'm reading this back to myself, it hardly sounds like serendipity, except for two reasons:1) a professor with whom I was interviewing absolutely had to make it to Philadelphia within two days and was driving herself there in a four-wheel drive, and generously offered me a ride so that I would be able to catch a flight from an airport that wasn't closed due to inclement weather; and 2) I saw just enough of winter weather to realize that moving there all by myself and committing to live in it for however many days each year that Mother Nature chose to send it for the next four years might not be the wisest course of action I could take. I still may choose to complete my one-year internship in a place with real winters -- perhaps even at or near the virtually Siberian facility where I interviewed -- but I'm not committing to any more than a single year in such a location.

My old on-again/off-again flame Jared was there. The flame never burned all that brightly to be perfectly honest, but it's still at least flickering. Who the hell knows where that relationship will end up? Only time will tell. 

School resumes for me on Monday. Matthew and I will make the return drive very late on Sunday. If a worst-case scenario were to materialize and we were to be stuck in traffic for ten straight hours and not make it back in time for class Monday morning, the professors and our advisers would be less than thrilled with us, but it wouldn't have any long-term ramifications where either of us are concerned. When we were new to the program, we had to be extra cautious about such things, as we will again need to be once we begin clinical rotations. For now, we're known not to be flakes and can each afford a minor screw-up or two.

I have less than thirty-three hours in which to successfully transition from my vacation mode persona of "merry sunshine Alexis" back to my school alter ego of Cutthroat Bitch. I'll probably make it if I begin the transition as soon as I get into my car for the return trip. Matthew and I will be driving separately, so he won't care.

Ski resorts in France, and, for that matter, in most of Europe,  know how to ring in the new year with elan. It wasn't quite so exciting where I was.

A Merry Little Christmas and Assorted Bullshit

what one of my pink scrub sets looks like

close to how the other set looks

I've never roasted chestnuts on an open fire or anywhere else. I don't know if I'd consider the resulting roasted chestnuts even edible. 

My family's Christmas was almost Rockwellian. I don't often pause to consider just how very fortunate I am that all of the relatives with whom we either celebrate holidays or associate on anything resembling a regular basis are normal, functional human beings. Whether we celebrate with the extended pseudo-relatives and my dad's brothers and their families near our home or travel to the San Joaquin Valley to celebrate with my Godparents, who are also my aunt and uncle, everyone is friendly. A fair amount of alcohol was probably consumed on Friday, but no one ever goes into drunken rages or practically gives themselves cases of acute alcohol poisoning at our holiday gatherings. We don't have major arguments that cause anyone to feel the need to leave. We're almost boring.

I've apparently become the most difficult member of the extended family for whom to buy Christmas presents. After my recent cello purchase, I now have the reputation of a person who buys anything she needs or really wants for herself. The reputation isn't all that far from actuality. 

During the entire time I was in high school, I worked at a steady part-time job at union scale wages as a piano accompanist; I even purchased salary protection insurance, so I continued to draw three-quarters of my contractual wages during the times I was injured or hospitalized.  At the time I spent only a small fraction of what I earned. I played for numerous masses, funerals, and weddings, banking the proceeds for those as well. I had enough scholarship money that I didn't need to self-finance my education, and my parents would have paid for my undergraduate degree, anyway. I earned just enough from occasional musical gigs in college that while I wasn't baking much, I at least didn't need to tap into my savings for spending money. Furthermore, I was gifted with two relatively sizable grants because of finishing third in in my undergraduate class. One of the grants I will use to supplement scholarship money to fund my medical school tuition, but the other will remain untouched and will continue to earn interest.

The end result is that I have an unusually large savings account for someone whose parents are presumably upper-middle class. (I know relatively little about my parents' finances, but I would assume that they would be considered as falling into the upper end of the middle class.) My original plan was not to touch any of my accrued earnings until my residency at the very earliest, and ideally not until beginning to work in an actual medical practice.

I've decided to amend the plan ever so slightly. I dipped into my savings to buy my cello just because I wanted it right then. I didn't want to drop hints so that my Godparents might possibly buy it for me for Christmas. A cello is a major enough undertaking that if one is going to obtain one, one wants the cello of his or her choosing and not something that someone who doesn't know a great deal about cellos might come across and elect to buy. 

I decided when I bought the cello that I was going to allow myself to spend a total of twenty-thousand of the dollars I have saved in any way that I want. I don't spend a great deal of money on clothing, but if I need or want a few outfits, the money for them will come from the twenty-thousand dollars. If I decide to travel on my own (my parents still pay my brother's and my expenses on family vacations), the money for my travels will come from the twenty-thousand. Money for auto maintenance as well as maintenance of my musical instruments will also come from the twenty-thousand. I could technically afford a larger discretionary allowance, but I don't really need it. 

Some people would say that even twenty-thousand dollars is extravagant and self-indulgent, but many of my classmates who have taken out educational loans will spend more on their discretionary expenses than what I have allotted for myself. My spending isn't too far from what my brother spends. He hasn't made any single purchase as large as my purchase of a cello, but he spends more on clothing and entertainment than I do. 

I'm not sure exactly where my brother's money comes from, but I'm not going to worry about it. His earning opportunities were not nearly what mine were in high school. My parents may be floating him a large loan that he will eventually pay back, or they may be giving him money. I could make myself miserable by concerning myself about the fairness of my brother getting money that I'm not getting from my parents,  but I choose instead to adopt the attitude that I'm very lucky not to need much help from them. I assume that if I were in need of financial assistance, I would get it from them. As it stands, I live rent-free in a condo that is owned by my parents. I'm happy to have that be essentially
the sum of their financial support.

In terms of presents this year, I was given a very nice stethoscope,  two sets of Dominant strings for my violin, one set for my cello [they're far from cheap], a double-strand of pearls, a few chain restaurant gift cards, and four sets of scrubs. Two of the sets of scrubs are pink; I had said that I would not wear pink scrubs, but since someone else bought them for me, I probably will wear them. We will wear hospital-issue scrubs when on official duty, but we wear our own for leisure wear, lectures,  labs, meetings, or for times when we go to the hospital to check on things but are not serving official shifts. There's ample time to wear our own scrubs, and every med school student I know has several sets. All of the sets I received somewhat fit me [they're not supposed to be form-fitting], and I commend those who gave them to me for going to the trouble of finding scrubs in small sizes.

I did midnight mass and mass today as well, but Christmas this year wasn't much of a religious experience for me. It's tough to for me to feel tremendously spiritual when I've scarcely had time to survive for the past four months. I assume that God is probably satisfied that I'm not breaking at least one of the ten commandments every time I leave my room (or, for that matter, enter it). We should all appreciate all of our loved ones while we still have them in our lives. Not one on us knows for certain how long any of us or our loved ones will be here.

Aloha Auinapo

I don't think I'd want to live there, but it's a great place to visit.

Our plane touched down just before 7:00 a.m.  Wednesday, bringing us safely home from Hawaii. It was a much-needed respite. I did absolutely nothing constructive in the entire seven days I was in Hawaii. I had not realized just how desperately I needed to do nothing constructive for awhile. I now feel almost sane for the first time in months.

My shopping has been done. I'm wrapping gifts right now. Mostly I'm lazy and use recycled gift bags, but I try to use actual wrapping paper for the kiddies' gifts because I think it's more fun for them to tear wrapping paper off a present than to merely take the gift from a bag.

Earlier this evening I had a date with one of my cohort mates. We had a good time, although I committed a major faux pas in falling asleep during the movie. I thought I'd gotten enough sleep on the plane last night to get me through today and tonight, but I apparently miscalculated. I hope my date didn't take it personally. C'est la vie. I'll sleep well tonight when I eventually make it to bed.

I didn't get a tan in Hawaii, but I did achieve my goal, which was to avoid a sunburn. If there's one thing I've learned so far in life, it is that melanoma is not your friend.

We (the general public) have absolutely no clue as to how Judge Alex feels about Donald Trump, Jeb Bush, or any other aspect of the presidential race!

what can be found in a google image search of "Donald Trump"

We're back at our hotel now. Midnight has come and gone, but neither my cousin nor my brother nor I feel like sleeping. My room here adjoins theirs with doors that lock on both sides. Right now Matthew is channel-surfing on the extra bed in my room while Josh is doing the same in their room. If Matthew falls asleep in my extra bed, it's fine. If he doesn't, that, too is fine.

I'm not using my TV because I'm reading a Facebook post of Judge Alex's.  I don't have a Facebook account. My mom was a district office administrator for the local school district  in our family's previous city of residence. One of her duties was to deal with anything connected to cyber-bullying, which typically happened at the middle school and high school level. Many years ago this may have involved Myspace, but in more recent years it was almost always related to Fecebook. She was so bothered by some of what she saw in terms of kids' interactions on Facebook that she offered my brother and me each five thousand dollars not to have Facebook accounts until we turned twenty-one. Initially she just said we could not have Facebook accounts, period, but as we got closer to leaving for college, the offer of cash to avoid social networks came into play. I have a Twitter account which is, like my blog, not under my actual surname, but she was OK with that as long as it remained low-key.

I have access to a password to someone else's account so that I can read Facebook postings that are either her friends' postings or public postings, but I don't post at all. Now that I'm twenty-one, I can have an account if I want, but I'm not sure I'll bother with it. Once I'm into or even halfway through a residency, I'll think about it if I have time. 

Anyway, Judge Alex made an interesting post. Donald Trump bought the rights to Jebbush.com. If a person types in "Jebbush.com," he or she is directed to Donald Trump campaign ads. Such a campaign tactic was, in my opinion, rather puerile of Trump and/or his staffers. Anyone whose vote would genuinely be swayed by such antics is probably cognitively beneath redemption and is probably too dull-witted to navigate his or her way into and out of a voting both, much less to correctly fill in a ballot. Still, the crux of Judge Alex's post was clearly that if a person is going to run for office and spend a large number of dollars in doing so, it might be a good idea to allot a few of those dollars to registering any domain closely associated with one's name.

A few of Judge Alex's followers understood the point of his post. Even more, seemingly, did not. Though the judge posted this more than a week ago, some of his followers are still arguing over the judge's wisdom, sanity, political smarts, and over an array of other attributes.  They're accusing him of supporting Donald Trump, of making fun of him, of wanting to bear Donald Trump's love child, and of God knows what else. 

All the man did was call attention to Trump's having bought the rights to the "Jeb.bush.com" domain.

Judge Alex has since gone into cyber-seclusion. He's probably banging his head against a wall. I don't blame him.

what is presently displayed at jebbush.com.

Impromptu Vacations, Irish Accents, Dates, and Harassing Professors

This is obviously not my actual professor, but he bears an eerie resemblance to this TV buffoon who was never a judge in real life but plays one on TV. He's no Judge Alex.

I'm on vacation with my family. It was an unexpected thing, at least as far as I was concerned. My dad walked into my room early Monday evening, announced that he was making reservations for the next morning, and asked if I wanted to come along. I didn't have many plans, so I said yes. So did my brother and the cousin who lives with my parents when he's not in school. We'll be home in a few days. I'll share more about the trip when I return.

We're in a bar that has an open mike format. My dad borrowed a guitar and played two songs. If my mom gets sufficiently wasted, she may perform as well, though I doubt she'll drink enough tonight to be persuaded. It's not at all that she's reticent about performing, but more the idea that she doesn't typically sing in bars. Right now Matthew is singing. He's seriously not bad. I'm jealous. I'd never noticed this before and don't hear it at all in his speech, but he has a bit of the Irish dialect, particularly audible in his vowel sounds, when he sings. My dad commented on it a moment ago.

My mom's mom was from Ireland and immigrated to the U.s. when she was seventeen. She supposedly never really lost her accent. My own mother spent probably a combined total of five years in Ireland while her dad was deployed to various [mostly southeast Asian] locations where an air corpsman wouldn't necessarily take his family along with him. Between being raised by a mother with a relatively strong accent and actually living on the Emerald Isle herself for a significant portion of her formative years, my mom has a slight but discernible brogue going on.

When Matthew and I were very young, singing on-key came quite easily to me. Matthew's singing was essentially atonal. It freaked my mother out that one of her offspring might be tone-deaf, so she spent a lot of time in those very early years singing with him and getting him to match her pitch. by the time he was maybe three-and-a-half, he could more or less stay on-key if he was singing along with someone else or with piano accompaniment. Matthew presumably picked up just a bit of an accent from her as well. Whatever. It will probably make the ladies think he's all the more charming. One of them is hitting on him right now.

I have a date for Wednesday night. A guy in my cohort lives just over a hundred miles from where my parents live. He texted me and invited me out for dinner and a movie. Other than the Star Wars sequel fiasco, which I haven't followed and don't intend to start now, I don't even know what movies are out now. I will not go to the Star wars sequel, but I'll suffer through anything else the guy chooses.

I didn't mention this earlier, but I played piano for a faculty event during finals week. It was a non-paying gig, but it's politically wise to do a few of those events when asked. Anyway, the annoying professor (the one who looks like Larry Bakman) who thinks I roll my eyes too much and questions my overuse of the words fiasco and debacle was in attendance. He predictably could not leave well enough alone and had to wander over to the piano to harass me. I was playing without music (it was just Christmas and light classical music that the chairman of the event wanted; who needs printed music for that?), and he asked how I knew what notes to play. I couldn't resist. I told the guy that God tells me what notes He wants to hear. The guy backed away looking spooked. He's a masochist. He had to know how I would answer his question.

I'll probably post again before the big day, but if not, happy Christmas to all and to all a good night, God bless us everyone, and merry fucking Christmas.

An Early Christmas Present

I received word indirectly from a dean at my school that I did very well on my finals for this term.

Sometimes studying seems like a waste of time. The material doesn't make sense even after you're committed it to memory. At other times, what you have studied has begun not only to make sense  in its own context but also fits into a larger picture in terms of clarifying the content from other classes and even from other sources not necessarily directly related to course you're taking. I've finally reached this point.

I'm not deluding myself into believing that the content from my courses I take will never again seem overwhelming or that I'll never wonder why in the world I decided that attending medical school would be a good idea. I assume it will continue to be tough, as the material is only going to grow more challenging as we progress. Still, I now have confidence that it's all within my grasp.

Merry Christmas, everyone. It's going to be a most merry Christmas for me.

Football Builds Character

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I've never been a major fan of much of anything relating to the state of Texas. I've driven through large expanses of it, though I recognize that the state is so massive that what I've seen is proportionally the rough equivalent  to  how much of the proverbial elephant each blind man took in. The physical appearance of the parts of Texas I've seen wasn't exactly awe-inspiring. I suppose if a person likes the parched southwestern look, there could be a certain appeal to places such as San Angelo or San Antonio. I don't particularly care for that stretch of the Gulf of Mexico, either. I suppose Galveston is charming in its own way, but I cannot imagine a sane person choosing to live there with its level of protection from storms, hurricanes, tsunamis, and the like.

While Texas doesn't have quite the weirdness-per-capita as Florida in terms of bizarre  happenings, it has to its credit a few "only in Texas" sorts of crimes, with the "cheerleading murder" standing out as such. Texas has a reputation for law enforcement and judicial systems being tough on criminals, and, if I'm not mistaken, Texas recently executed the first woman in the U. S. in quite some time. The "don't mess with Texas" mindset is evident. Texas residents are proud of their gun-toting mentality, and like to proclaim in reference to various crimes or supposed abuses of citizens' rights that such a thing would never happen in Texas. (Again if I'm not mistaken, at least one mass shooting at the University of Texas did happen.)

High school football seems to be second only to gun-toting or perhaps to Bible thumping in Texas, if it is indeed second even to either one of the aforementioned pursuits. My mom did  large portion of her doctoral research using Texas-based data.  The focus of her study was on the success rate of grade level retention or repetition when the primary impetus was to provide the retainee with an additional growth year in order to maximize chances of success in football. Ironically, the athletic retention is the one circumstance of grade level retention that isn't more often than not more harmful than beneficial to the retainee himself. I could go into the sociological and psycho-educational ramifications of grade level repetition, but it's too complex an issue to be addressed in the amount of time and space I would have to devote to it at this time. It could be a subject for another day's blog . . . or it could not.



Anyway, Texas came to the forefront too long ago in an incident in which a high school assistant football coach ordered football players to "take out" a referee, allegedly in retaliation for the use of a racial epithet. http://abcnews.go.com/US/high-school-football-coach-told-players-referee-pleads/story?id=35766294The referee denies ever using the racial epithet. http://abcnews.go.com/Sports/blindsided-texas-football-ref-denies-racial-slurs/story?id=33652643 I'm not even sure it matters in terms of the commission of the crime. Certainly no one should be allowed to referee a game who hurls racial epithets at athletes or at anyone else. Once a coach has responded  to the racial insult, which may or may not have actually happened and which the coach did not actually hear, with involving minors in the act of an assault, the conflict has been taken to an entirely different level.

It used to be - and still is in the eyes of the law in most places in the U.S. -- that nothing a person said gave anyone else the legal right to retaliate physically. We know that what can be done legally and what actually will happen are often two entirely different things. While it would be wise to consider one's own well-being before spouting off beyond a certain respectable level, rules or laws consistently came down firmly against whomever chose to take something to the physical level. Now it seems that if a racially charged comment was made or if something was said about one of the battling parties' mothers, rules against physical retaliation do not necessarily hold up and that assault may be considered justified. I wouldn't be all that surprised at some point in the near future to see actual laws revised to reflect this modern way of thinking.

I'm not suggesting that anyone should make racially insensitive comments or comments of any other sort intended to inflame an already charged situation or to hurt someone. I don't think I've ever in my life spoken a racial epithet.  And yes, I know all about the "yelling fire in a crowded theatre" qualifier of free speech. But even if a person does yell "fire" in a crowded theatre -- either literally or metaphorically speaking -- does that give another the right to assault the person?

The coach had other options when he learned of the alleged use of a racial epithet. If such indeed happened,  why did the coaching staff not complain through more official channels. The assistant coach  could first of all have referred the situation to his immediate job superior, who would have been in this situation the team's head coach. Perhaps the head coach might have chosen to immediately pull players off the field and to refuse to continue the game until the epithet-spouting referee was replaced.  Perhaps the battle could have been waged by school administrators or athletic commissioners. Almost anything would have been preferable to ordering adolescent boys to exact their own revenge by committing assault.

As a victim of physical assault at the hands and feet of a football player (an off-the-field player in my case, but a football player nonetheless), I resent the excuse that acts of violence happen in the "heat of the game." That sort of justification led indirectly to my own assault. I refuse to cower to any Neanderthal rationalization that football is a world of its own with its own rules, and that women have no grasp of it and, hence, no right to criticize football-induced  profanity, violence, or anything else associated with it because we're not part of that world.

The situation should be investigated if only to ensure that if the referee in question did indeed use racial epithets in an officiating or other educational capacity, he does not gain another opportunity to repeat his performance. We have no evidence at this point other than the word of an unethical and unprofessional coach (who did not hear the epithet) and of students involved in the retaliation and of one of their teammates that such did happen. For the good of  the youth in the state of  Texas, a thorough investigation should take place.

As far as the coach is concerned, however, he has, in my opinion, no standing in terms any demands of exoneration by virtue of anything the referee may or may not have said. When he chose to take the conflict to the level that he did, he forfeited that right. Neither do I hold the athletes who physically committed the assault blameless. They had to know, unless they are  literal morons, that they were not under any obligation to follow the assistant coach's unsportsmanlike, immoral, and illegal directive. They, too, should face stiff consequences.

My Nightmare Before Christmas (that has nothing to do with Christmas)

Have you ever wanted vacation time (with vacation in the particular sense I'm using it referring to time off from work or school as opposed to a specific trip or travel agenda) so intensely that you could barely make it through the remaining days of work or school, only to have it arrive and to find yourself almost unable to function without the usual rigors of work or school? Is this something that happens to ordinary people, or am I even more abnormal than I previously thought?

Final exams came and went. I did well and maintained my average, and managed not to freak out during any of the finals. I've had nightmares about totally losing my composure during exams, but so far haven't even become upset (except perhaps for the time the professor asked an arbitrary and irrelevant question for which he'd never divulged his bogus answer, and even then I was highly irritated but very much in control of myself). I talked to my shrink (for the record, I was under the care of a psychiatrist when I was sorting out PTSD issues following a physical and sexual assault, but I'm not under continued psychiatric care, not that there would be anything wrong with it if I were still seeing a shrink) on the phone earlier this evening. He's a family friend, so I can call him whenever I want to talk to him. I don't abuse the privilege, and he doesn't charge me. 

My former shrink said my dreams are the rough equivalent to the ones lots of people have, often persisting for many years after they've completed the formal education process, in which they either cannot locate the classroom for a course in which they've been enrolled for an entire term or they walk into the classroom to take an exam either never having attended a single class session or perhaps having shown up once or twice in an entire term. In any event, the common thread is that people who are ordinarily relatively diligent students find themselves thoroughly ill-prepared for a mid-term or final exam in their dreams, often long after whatever degrees they'll ever have were long since awarded. Maybe I'll have those dreams someday, or maybe I'll just continue to have the dreams where I scream at the top of my lungs in a crowded auditorium because something about the test cause me to lose all sensibilities.

It has never been clear in my dreams just what it is about any of the the exams that caused me to come unglued. It just happens. My former shrink said if I could ever discover in any particular dream what it was that caused me to flip out, I might be able to address it in some way, but that in the meantime, worrying about it will only make it worse. He said that dreams are basically just dreams and aren't necessarily of any significance. He says I do not ever have to actually go bananas during an exam and have an all-out screamfest. I can choose not to scream no matter how daunting the circumstance of any exam if it is important to me not to carry on while both humiliating myself and disrupting the testing process for my fellow students. If I've studied, the exam probably will not be intimidating to me in the first place, but even if something about it were to be, it is within my power to control my reaction. Just because I've had a nightmare in which I've behaved a particular way when faced with a circumstance does not dictate that such is the way I must react if I'm ever faced with such a circumstance in a conscious setting.

Still I wish that particular dream theme with its slight variations would stop haunting me during my sleep. I've had and continue to have recurring nightmares of a more disturbing nature than is that particular one. I'd take that one any day over three other recurring nightmares that I would prefer not to share and that I'm reasonably certain my readers would just as soon not  read about.

So now vacation is upon me a week earlier than most of academia has started vacation, which is nice except that I'm not quite sure what to do with myself in my leisure. My brother and I, along with several of our high school friends, spent the weekend with my late friend Claire's family. It was time very well spent, but the weekend is now over. 

I'm now in a particular nook of California's vast Central Valley. My friend Raoul from medical school wanted me to visit him at his brother's home in the southern or San Joaquin portion of the Central Valley. We hung out at the emergency room where his brother works as an MD earlier in the evening. Tomorrow we're going to do whatever it is that people in this place normally do to entertain themselves except that we won't be using any methamphetamines, which is probably the number one form of recreation in this valley. One of the people we observed in the E. R. had gotten his hands on some especially toxic meth. The results were not pretty. In place of meth, we will visit my aunt's preschool classroom. One of her special needs preschoolers has just discovered the "MF" word, so it might be mildly amusing. We won't stay for too long, as there's a limit to the potential entertainment value of a three-year-old hurling expletives. Following our preschool encounter, we will drive into the nearby mountains. El Nino is in effect this season, so the drought is temporarily on hold. We may even see snow.

One nice aspect to living in this valley is that it's such an utter slum that property values are low. Nice housing is extremely affordable. Of course it's only nice housing as long as one is inside the walls of the house, but sometimes one would do well to make lemonade of the unbelievably sour lemons one has been given. Even though Raoul's brother is only in his first year out of his residency, he owns in a home that is both larger and nicer than the one in which my parents presently live. The area surrounding Raoul's brother's house looks somewhat like what I would imagine Kuwait to look minus the roaming camels, but the inside of the house looks like something Martha Stewart would own. The guest room in which I'm spending tonight and tomorrow night (without Raoul in case you're wondering) has its own fireplace. Unfortunately, the air quality here is so utterly abysmal that the EPA only allows people here to have fires for maybe twenty or so days out of the year. Fortunately, tonight is attached to one of those twenty days. Even if I'm wide awake, I'm at least toasty and warm inside the bedroom-with-a-fireplace.

The Many Faces of Ted Cruz and Other Matters With Which I'm far Too Busy to Concern Myself But Do Despite Present Time Constraints

I copied and pasted the first nine images

of Cruz that appeared in a Google Images search of "Ted Cruz."

I omitted image #3 because it was a closer view of image #1.

I did otherwise nothing to manipulate the results in order to gain stranger looking images of Cruz.

Any manipulation was done either by the folks at Google 

or by the photographers

or by Ted Cruz himself.

Perhaps he deliberately makes farcical faces whenever a camera is pointed at him.

You be the judge.

I'd first like to say that I believe or at least hope that the American public is smarter than the polls would indicate. I believe that at least a part of those people who have told the pollsters that they support Donald Trump for president are, in actuality, too smart to vote for him. While it may seem fun for some strange reason to some people to pretend that Trump would make an acceptable president, when those people are actually faced with a ballot bearing the names of candidates, I'd like to think that most of even those individuals who have indicated support for Trump in some ways in the past won't be able to force themselves to cast their votes for him. A relative few of them, in my estimation, probably truly are stupid enough to elect such a man to a position that gives him access to even more power than the power his money already affords him. Most people, however, may be sufficiently disillusioned with the political process to pretend they'd like to elect change by electing a man who is foreign to the political process, but in the final analysis, they'll recognize that placing someone with Trump's disposition and level of self-control in such close proximity to the black box is too daunting a prospect to undertake voluntarily. The North Koreans had no choice when it came to Kim Jong Un and his ascension to power. This is, however, the U. S. A. In theory, at least, we all have a say in the matter. 

But enough of political pontifications and doomsday predictions. What I actually wish to say even though it pertains to a presidential candidate, is not all that political in nature. 

Why does Ted Cruz consistently look so goofy in his pictures? I understand that he has many people following him around with cameras. If someone took enough pictures of me, I'm sure I'd be caught with silly expressions in some of my photos. I don't know if I could compete with Ted Cruz on that battle ground, however, even if I consciously attempted to look crazy or ditzy or foolish.

Is the biased liberal media so out to get Cruz that they've convinced the folks at Google to post at least four pictures of Cruz in which he looks as though he's deliberately displaying preposterous faces for every single image in which Cruz looks even remotely lucid? The question may sound sarcastic, but I'm actually asking it with sincerity.

Don't make any conclusions based on the information I'm providing. Go to Google and type in Cruz's name, then click on "Images." See for yourself. I'm interested in feedback from anyone who has an opinion. If you wish for your feedback to be private, either DM me at my Twitter or email me at aleximerc@aol.com. I keep confidences.

I'm down to a single final exam remaining. The other six all went well. The last final exam is a combination practical / written test, and is potentially ugly, but I've studied diligently already and will, counting both independent and group study time, put in about five more hours in preparation for it.

Alexis Is 21

My birthday wasn't quite this exciting, but it was fun nonetheless.

I'm twenty-one now.  As such I'm legally old enough for almost everything anyone else is other than senior citizen-types of discounts and privileges.  Some rental car companies will not allow a person under twenty-five to operate their vehicles.  If I ever need a rental car, I'll find out what companies rent to individuals under the age of twenty-five.  Otherwise, I don't really care.  The other obvious exceptions are the right to serve in the U. S. House of Representatives, for which I would need to be twenty-five, and  the right to serve in the U. S. Senate, for which I'd need to be thirty.  Another notable exception is that to run for or to serve as a U. S. president or vice-president, I'd need to be thirty-five.  The minimum ages for the various U. S. state governor positions vary by state. I have no intention whatsoever of aspiring to fill any of these positions or, for that matter, any other political office,  so the point is essentially moot where I am concerned.

In terms of minimum ages for political positions, even though it doesn't pertain to me, I'm not without misgivings about the premise. If the voting public knows how old a candidate is and chooses to elect him or her anyway, it should, in theory,  be the right of the  public to make a collective decision via the voting process regarding his or her fitness to hold a given office.  My mom and I discussed this recently, and she doesn't agree with me.  She believes that  in today's world, with a level of media coverage [that could never have been anticipated by Madison and the other founding fathers as they were drafting the pertinent statutes of our nation's constitution] and with the tendency of a large segment of our society to venerate the qualities of youth and physical attractiveness, a highly unqualified candidate could potentially be forced upon us by a voting public, the majority of which might very well be too ignorant to look beyond a candidate's glowing physical attributes. A similar case could be made in regard to candidates with other blatant deficits in qualification for our nation's highest office, but such an objective across-the-board disqualifier would be far more elusive to implement than was the simple age requirement. We all still may eventually be doomed by the public's stupidity in voting in a wildly unqualified presidential candidate, but the candidate will not be the rough equivalent of perhaps a thirty-year-old Brad Pitt, voted in primarily for his unprecedentedly telegenic advantages. Maybe my mom has a point, but enough with  political pontification.

My big day came and went without major incident. I did go to a bar to celebrate along with many of my cohort mates, many of whom actively look for any reason to get wasted. My brother came along to serve as my designated driver. While it sounds like a highly selfless act on his part, he wouldn't have had anything to drink anyway because he never drinks during the week when school is in session. Medical school is challenging enough for him even if he's not drunk or hung over. Matthew has also had far more opportunities to party than I have had. He looks older than I do, and hardly anyone has thought  twice about passing a beer to him for the past couple of years. 

I drank the two mixed drinks I had planned to consume on my twenty-first birthday: one mai tai and one strawberry daiquiri.  My alcohol consumption left me reasonably wasted but not to the degree that I was impaired the next morning. My conclusion regarding drinking is that while it might be something to do once in awhile for major celebrations when circumstances are such that my drinking would not place me in any sort of perilous situation, neither is drinking something I feel compelled to do. After consuming the two alcoholic beverages, I ordered a virgin strawberry daiquiri. I liked it every bit as much as I liked the one with booze in it. I don't feel driven to drink.

I'm in the midst of finals. It's rather intense -- something to which only other medical students can really relate, although law students and engineering students have tough programs with difficult exams as well. I've finished three tests and have four more to go. I should do well on them because I'm well-prepared, although I will study independently and with my groups until all of the exams have been completed. My school  has a pass-fail system for the first two years. Some of my cohort mates benefit from this policy. It isn't particularly helpful to me. I'm too obsessive to be content simply with passing, and I know the powers that be are tracking all of our actual scores and not merely whether we've passed or failed. This is still probably the best school for me for other reasons, but the pass-fail system is essentially lost on me.

This quarter will conclude for me just past noon on Friday, at which point I will be able to breathe comfortably for the fist time in over four months.

This video -- the official video for the song -- doesn't belong to me, obviously.  I played the song for a wedding awhile ago. The singer needed the song to be done in the key of C. I didn't really like the song then. Then I paid more attention to Christina Perry's recording, in which the song is sung in B-flat. It's just a full step, or an interval of a major second, in difference between this version and the song as I played it at the wedding of which I wrote, but it makes all the difference in the world in terms of how the song sounds. Sometimes subtle differences can be huge. That's how I feel about grades in medical school. Not everyone thinks there's a difference between a 100% and a 72% as long as one receives a passing score. I couldn't adopt that mindset even if I tried. I cannot escape the feeling that it may  someday matter in the lives of our patients.