The Kid Does Art

Meanwhile, the Kid's art class visits the university's natural history museum and they draw skeletons

The Kid and Single-Payer Heath Care

So over on Twitter, that place, some clever fiscal conservative made a crack about single-payer health care not being a workable solution because Americans are so fat and lazy.

Meanwhile, about ten days ago, the kid got what we thought was the flu. Well, at first we thought it was a cold. When they* tweeted me asking was it normal for their fingernails to be blue and their hands to be numb, I made them go to the clinic. At this point, I was mostly worried about it being a really bad flu or even pneumonia.

There, the PA ran tests, several of which came back with disquieting results. She sent the kid for a CT. The CT came back showing a "nodule" in the lower right lobe of the kid's lung.

More CT scan, a full chest this time. More blood tests. The kid's ANA is slightly off. Her liver readings are slightly off. Does she have an autoimmune disease? Is it something worse? Who knows?**

We're seeing an autoimmune guy next week.

Meanwhile, because we don't have single payer, and because the American healthcare system is useless and horrible, not only do we get to live through days and weeks of anxiety, we also get charged thousands of dollars. (Our deductible, before the insurance kicks in, is $3000 per person. This is after we pay on the order of $7000/year for health insurance, plus a $35/co-pay every time we visit our PCP -- God forbid we need to see a specialist.)

But yeah. Americans are fat and lazy. That's the problem with our healthcare system.


*The kid is, as many of your know, genderfluid, and has asked for they/them pronouns. I know y'all will support them!

**It may well be nothing at all. This is what we are hoping for, and my friends in the healthcare profession have given me good reason to hope for this outcome. But of course we must follow up on it -- and despite what these free market conservatives would have you believe, it is not like we can fucking shop around, looking for a clinic that will charge us just a little less for a CT scan, maybe over there in Oklahoma?

The Kid Does Art

Homework for her Studio I class -- they had to do a still life of their dorm room

Charcoal and pencil on mixed-media paper

Links for You

Happy Sunday -- have some links!

The kids are alright

Aw, look here

And here (you gotta scroll down a bit)

Here is what happens when someone who can reason encounters someone who is spouting RW talking points. It's a video, but it's short, and absolutely worth listening to.

This, an article at the Atlantic by Ta-Nehisi Coates, is long, but also well worth reading: The First White President.  Every time I read Coates, it's like receiving a gift I didn't even know I needed.

These sorts of articles, on the other hand, are just so much infuriating bullshit. Oh, yes, thank you. That's exactly what I need to do. Quit spending money at Starbucks! Why didn't I think of that! Sweet Jesus. I should probably quit eating so much avocado toast while I'm at it.

You know what I need, in order not to be poor? To make more fucking money. And to have far less of my money going to medical bills and health insurance. That's what I need in order not to be poor. Shut the fuck up about how I'm spending too much money at Starbucks.

(Okay. Deep breath.)

This is definitely worth reading, especially for all y'all who have or know LGBT teens.


All over the internet -- and not just on the Right side of the net either -- people are clutching their pearls over a few students holding protests, passing around petitions, or otherwise being students. Meanwhile, people who have actual power, Conservative people, are doing shit like this, and oddly enough no one says a thing about it.

Meanwhile, the same people who clutch their pearls over the terrible, terrible fainting snowflakes on the left, are also clutching their pearls over the shocking behavior of this Leftist child.

Especially appropriate since I'm teaching Plato this week

Have a frog

Visiting the Kid

We went up to visit the kid yesterday, on a day trip. Since almost all the other students had gone home for the long weekend, the campus and the town were less crowded than usual.

New Story!

The Sockdolager has released its Summer Issue, with a new story by me!

Read it here -- The Taste of Grief.

Links

The weather has broken early here -- highs only in the mid-eighties this week, and less humidity. Here's hoping it last.

Have some links!

A post of mine from seven years ago explains why Trump got elected


Related: Spencer's Fallacy

But this article about  the men who vandalized one of our mosques here made me feel better about our country today (it's also one of the best articles about Fort Smith I've ever read: very accurate!)

Related, sort of, and also interesting

On the creation of gender

Socratic knowledge

Shadow syllabus

Socialism in America

My kid draws something:

Those are characters from her comic, Fragile


Also this:

Feels like a good time to repeat this one. pic.twitter.com/DMqLnIXNDZ

— Nathan Burgoine (@NathanBurgoine) August 15, 2017

And this:

My semester

...so far

Y'all, I took an overload. This means I have 82 Comp II students.

Also 17 fiction workshop students, and 26 Global Lit students.

And I'm working on the Fault Line edits.

So basically I'll see you in December.

File This Under

...things I feel terrible for laughing about.

Other News

There is a tiny, tiny Wal-Mart on the campus of the Kid's university -- smaller than a convenience store.

The students call it the Small-Mart.

The Kid Finds Food

Classes don't start until Monday on the kid's campus, so today she's been dealing with problems and exploring.

Here's her first meal in the dining hall:

That's a grapefruit, raw carrots, tater tots and "some kind of meat," to quote the kid.  We were worried she would not be able to find food without corn syrup in the dining hall, but it looks like she can!

The Kid Departs

My kid has gone off to college -- we drove her up yesterday, helped her carry everything into her dorm room, took her to lunch, and then drove away.

It's an odd and somewhat scary feeling, I must say, to leave your child behind. But she's doing very well! She loves being there, and she's dealing with everything: meeting up with her RA, finding out where her classes will meet, buying the trash can we forgot she might need.

Here's a few views of her dorm room:

Racism in America

Here is one of my earliest memories, one I have never, ever admitted to anyone.

I was four years old. My family had just moved out of New Orleans proper -- in New Orleans, we lived in a trailer park in Gentilly, which was near the interstate overpass, and very close to the Community coffee factory. Every morning I would wake on the lower bunk of the bunkbed I shared with my older brother (my little brother had the crib) smelled roasting coffee. I still remember how wonderful that smell was.

Links for You

Tomorrow the kid goes off to college. Today we're packing and taking care of last minute details.

Have some links!

Nancy Kress on science and science fiction

Athena Andreadis on left-handness (the science and the social history)

My Review of Sisters of Tomorrow

My review of Lisa Yaszek and Patrick Sharp's Sisters of Tomorrow is live at Strange Horizons.

Why does this erasure matter? For two reasons, as Russ notes. First, when we are denied models, it’s much harder to believe that we can succeed. If it were possible for women to write science fiction, we ask as young writers, wouldn’t there be lots of science fiction written by women? Any writer needs to believe her task is possible if she is to make it through the many years of struggle. Second, if almost all women writers are erased—so that we’re left, for instance, with only a few names (Ursula Le Guin, Octavia Butler, Connie Willis), writers who seem to exist in isolation—then it’s much easier to believe that these very few women succeeded not because women can write science fiction, but because they were some sort of freak. (She wrote it, but she’s not really a woman.)