06 February 2009

The Cost of the Surgery Just Went Up Twenty Percent And I'm Trying Not To Think About It

Today I learned that the cost of my surgery might increase by as much as $4000. Dr. Marci Bowers' office cited large increases in costs, particularly insurance. That seems to be a problem for a lot of doctors these days.

Hmm...Maybe I should ask for donations. I could put a link on this page for Pay Pal or some such thing. Naah. Their fees have gotten too high. Besides, that seems like a surefire way of getting emails from people who are related to Nigerian princes (How many of them are there?) but who are in a terrible emergency, so would I deposit their wire transfer into my account and then transfer it to an account of their choice?--and I would get a commission, of course.

Which bridge do they want to sell me? No deal: I'm buying a stairway to heaven. Actually, if I had enough money, I'd buy the original tape or record (whichever it is) of Stairway to Gilligan's Island. It was on YouTube a while back. I don't know whether it's still there. If it is, check it out.

If there had been a stairway to Gilligan's Island, the island wouldn't be Gilligan's because the Minnow would never have been shipwrecked there. How would the world be a different place?

Something occurs to me now: Gilligan's Island was really a plug for colonialism. Think about it: When you watch that show, 99.9% of the time you're seeing the crew of the Minnow, all of whom (including Gilligan) are white and, presumably, protestant. Once in a great while you see a "native" who paints his body, wears feathers and talks in gibberish. The same could be said for F Troop which, if I recall correctly, had its run at about the same time as Gilligan's Island.

Kids like me watched stuff like that. So we were really taught that a certain amont of racism, or at least Cauco-centrism, was normal precisely because we couldn't see that it was exactly that.

You know how it is: The kid starts off with GI and F Troop; next thing you know, he's into Mein Kampf. Or, as George Carlin said, beer definitely leads to heroin.


Even if you put aside whatever conceptions you have about Hitler, MK is one of the world's most excruciating reads. The writing is wretched and repetetive. A prof who's fluent in German says that MK--as well as Das Kapital --are actually better in translation than in the original. If that's not a disincentive to learn German, I don't know what is.

Perhaps I should write a book about how television teaches kids to embrace such awful things as racism. Maybe it'll make me a whole bunch of money and I won't have to think about the cost of surgery or anything else. It might also make me the transgendered version of Tipper Gore. Oh, my!

Hmm...I'm undergoing this transition to become Tipper Gore. Or Phyllis Schlafly. Or how about Andrea Dworkin?

Oh, dear. Now you've just seen proof that I have to write earlier in the day. See what happens when you're up late at night with nothing but your laptop?

G'night, all.