Offline seismic activity
in my life at the moment. Won’t discuss it.
Have a happy Fourth
and, enough about me.
Check and see if your town has the following resources: Free Windows Excel and Powerpoint classes at the local library….I say thanks to DPL. They’ve got other great resources too.
And yay, only cigar bar patrons and casino gamblers will be able to smoke in Colorado starting tomorow.
Ambivalent about more genetic testing for Colorado’s newborns…in about five years, I figure someone wanting to scare us needlessly about genetic conditions will use the stats to say, “Why have reported incidents of [pick the illness they are now testing for] risen so dramatically in the last five years?”
Because you started all-newborn testing for them in 2006, dim-bulb.
It reminds me of the ad run by Senator Wayne Allard to court seniors/the disabled sometime back…
Paraphrased: Social Security has risen every year since Senator Allard took office.
When confronted with the fact that Social Security has automatic cost of living raises written into it, the Senator’s staffer pulled a Dan Fielding and said : “What’s your point?”
The Parent Track
Via The Gimp Parade, this blog, showcases a family of disabled parents and their kids….
🙂
A wonderful place, a wonderful truth.
It doesn’t matter *how* they manage difficult situations. Just that they do/will continue to do so.
"Unreasonable" Medicaid Cuts
If we didn’t have the recently-revamped Supremes above this decision, I’d be pleasantly interested in the legal track that led to this Appeals Court to determine that cutting necessary medical equipment from low income adults wasn’t reasonable.
Now, from my cynical perch, I’ll just wait for the language from a higher circut or the Supremes themselves, no doubt a fantastically researched legally correct document that will have no shame at all in explaining how “reasonable” these cuts are.
When search engines aren’t.
Both on Yahoo and Google there are mechanisms to pull up search term specific articles on “quilting” “vacations” “cats”
Whatever one wants to search for.
but the search engine for “disability” shows several things.
The articles written have several categories that have little to do with those of us with impairments.
1. Business articles praising the profitability of various private disability insurance carriers, that many or most will not be covered under, since we are either “excluded” by existing disabilities, or couldn’t afford disability insurance. Only rich persons who become disabled have these sorts of safety nets to look forward to. If you’re poor and become disabled, or worse yet, are born with impairment…forget it.
2. The ‘patient overcomer’ or ‘inspirational achiever’ framing. Crip jocks in particular have a real tough time avoiding that kind of storytelling. “Murderball” which dares to be cool and realistic at the same time, is an exception…as much as Larry King tried to fit those guys into the ‘inspirational achiever’ box when he interviewed them.
3. General stories about hospitals, drugs, diseases.—Yawn. Once again folks…we are not our impairments.
4. And the one exception that tests the rule: The searcher, Inclusion Daily used at the Ragged Edge -link @ right.
Without #4 above, it would be a really large haystack of irrelevant crap to funnel through to hear about the things that persons with disabilites do/say/fight for/have an interest in.
Some relations are more than that…
they’re good friends.
One of my good friends, a cousin and his wife back east have been going through a rough one, so I thought I’d write about him.
When I was a teenager he, like me, understood the true value of wasting many hours putting together tapes with music, humor and just the right lyrics
“People are strange when you’re a stranger
Faces look ugly when you’re alone.
Women seem wicked when you’re unwanted.
Streets are uneven when you’re down
When you’re strange… Faces come out of the rain
When you’re strange… No one remembers your name
When you’re strange When you’re strange When you’re…. strange.
People are strange when you’re a stranger..
Faces look ugly when you’re alone…
Women seem wicked when you’re unwanted
Streets are uneven when you’re down…
When you’re strange Faces come out of the rain
When you’re strange
No one remembers your name When you’re strange When you’re strange When you’re… strange
When you’re strange Faces come out of the rain When you’re strange
No one remembers your name When you’re strange When you’re strange When you’re …strange…”
Copyright “The Doors” no infringement intended or implied.
…these odd conglomerations then flew back and forth between us and by the time we’d sent three or four back and forth we were great friends.
In later years we would laugh hysterically at each other’s dating woes, and occasionally go out drinkin’
After I’d gone through my tough stuff, if I happened to be in his neck of the woods, he was always one of the best and funniest listening ears I had. I also watched in growing awe at his collections. Mac computers, games, dizzying numbers of phone makes and models (he’s in the telecommunications industry, and his most recent beloved hobby is older phones) His wife has steadied him down some, and both of them have really had to cling to one another on the lifeboat of their life recently.
They’re not mad achievers *and they don’t need to be* They’re funny, gentle, neat people *just as they are.* It’s not only those whith disabilities that get judged by some insanely high level of expectation.
He’s had a loss this year…but whenever I chat with him the cheerfulness still seems to be there.
More “strange” people like that I say.
Midlife And Treachery 
