Sunday, January 19, 2014

One sentence journal, Jan 12 – 18

The Birds

Time marches on . . .


1/12, Sunday. Thanks to Lynda, who had the grit to spend an eternity on the phone to a technical support center somewhere on the globe, the new Roku is now set up, and switching it on is like arriving at the ticket counter of a multiplex and discovering that a thousand movies are playing.

1/13, Monday. So it turns out again that I’m a poor diagnoser of my own ailments, since a doctor at Urgent Care says what I have is not carpal tunnel, but something more like tennis elbow.

1/14, Tuesday. Pigeons flock to a house on the corner where a retired gentleman lives with a Basset Hound and throws out snacks for the birds, who hang out all day like they’re waiting to audition for a remake of a Hitchcock movie.

1/15, Wednesday. After waiting a week and a half and then spending another hour in the waiting room to see a specialist who takes all of two minutes to send me to another specialist, who can’t see me for another 2 weeks or more, I’m thinking, I’m going to get a lot of reading done before this is over.

1/16, Thursday. Good grief, I wake up in the middle of the night realizing that I have been dreaming of composing one-sentence journal entries, and I’m wondering, is this such a good idea?

1/17, Friday. A bump under my chair in the middle of an episode of “Justified” on the TV, the dog giving me a startled look, and I check usgs.gov later to discover a 3.0 seismic disturbance over in Yucca Valley.

1/18, Saturday. Koan for the week: Don’t search for the truth, simply stop having opinions, and I’m thinking if that were generally put into practice, 95% of what’s on the Internet would disappear.


Image credit: Ron Scheer

Coming up: Julia Robb, Del Norte

7 comments:

  1. stop having opinions. That is brilliancy indeed.

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  2. Ron, every one of the sentences is a gem, the Saturday line particularly so. Recently, I read a nice humourous article about how the internet has turned its users into hypochondriacs, doctors without degrees. One study revealed that people spend hours surfing the internet for the real cause behind their non-existing illnesses.

    I have been told that doctors in the West only give quick appointments for life-threatening cases and that the non-serious cases have to wait their turn over a period of time. Here, in India, one can walk into a GP's clinic any time, or talk to him or her over the phone (even at night), and easily get an appointment with a specialist including with the referrals.

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    1. You raise a lot of issues to respond to. It’s hard to believe much of what you hear about the healthcare system in this country because it has become such a fierce political issue. In the Palm Springs area where I live, it is possible to get the kind of service you describe if you pay an annual subscription fee of $500-600.

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    2. Ron, I often read about the healthcare debate in the US in the Indian media. We get the service without subscription fees except for what you pay the doctor or the hospital, either through your own pockets or through Mediclaim (Medicare). Of course, one often has to fight for claim settlements. While healthcare in India is expensive for the middle class and poor, it is easily accessible to all, through municipal and government-run hospitals.

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    3. I see my response from yesterday did not turn up. My constant wrist pain turned out to be caused by sleeping on my hands. And twisted hands at that. Not sure how to correct this though. My mother had me sleep in a harness and I wonder if it all began then. Along with so many other things.

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  3. You can now watch Warner Archive Collection movies via instant streaming on your Roku. (In case you didn't know that.) Like -- Wagon Master in High Definition.

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