Livingston, I Presume

Here comes the judge

As the healthcare debate rages on, so do the many blog posts, interviews, and letters to the editor decrying the unfairness of potentially being forced to pay for other people’s “lifestyle choices.” The argument goes something like this, “Why should I, an active, thin person who eats nothing but bok choy and tofu, have to pay for the healthcare of my fat neighbor, in whose grocery cart I once saw Ho-Hos and whose television glows blue in the evenings?”

For brevity’s sake, I won’t get in to the problematic assumption that fat people never eat bok choy or engage in physical activity and that thin people never eat Ho-Hos or watch television, or the notion that weight—a state of being, not a behavior, by the way—is a good proxy for health. Because even laying those issues aside, there exists another significant problem with this idea. Namely, where does it stop?

Screedy!

President Obama is coming to Bozeman on Friday. Schedule conflicts are going to mean that we probably won't get to go see him, but I am going to be nervous all week about the people who are going to be able to show up. I like to think of my neighbors as tolerant, reasonable people, and I don't want to be proven wrong in the national spotlight. Unfortunately, given that event info is being spread in the right-wing blogosphere faster than forgeries of Obama's birth certificate, I am not hopeful that the best of Big Sky Country is going to be on display.

A couple of weeks ago I paid a visit to Max Baucus' Bozeman office. I was there to give his staff some information from MomsRising.org about healthcare. My visit happened to coincide with the first of what have now become regular demonstrations in front of that office by the Tea Party crowd, waving their signs about "socialism" and "government" healthcare. It was infuriating. As I was outnumbered 50 to 1, I restrained myself, but I came away with this: If more than 5 percent of the people at that demonstration even had a passport--much less had been outside the country long enough to have any personal knowledge about "socialism" and other "foreign" healthcare systems--I'll eat my beret. And that of my socialism-loving husband.

What's getting lost in all this insanity is that real people--people I know, even, and probably people you know as well--are suffering because of the current system. And, as Southern Beale writes in an incredibly moving post, Sarah Palin's "death panels" are already here. It's just that they're staffed by insurance company executives more interested in profit than people.

It's disingenuous at best and downright deceptive at worst for anti-reform "protestors" to pretend that our current system doesn't already have faceless bureaucrats between me and my doctor. They're there every time a cancer patient has to wait to start his treatment because they put a hold on his chemo so that the company go through his policy line by line, looking for any reason they can find to drop his coverage. They're there when a woman gets 48 hours--maximum--to stay in the hospital after she gives birth. They're there when a patient is released early after major abdominal surgery, only to have to be readmitted again and again because his healing isn't progressing as it should at home. Not to mention when that patient acquires MRSA at the emergency room where he has to go because he probably shouldn't have been released in the first place.

I'll take the faceless bureaucrat who works for me, thank you very much.

Our first new car

Well, after a long, long day of car shopping and test driving, we chose a 2010 Subaru Forester (it's from the future!).

We picked it up yesterday after what seemed like an even longer day filling out more forms and signing and stamping in triplicate like we were executing a Czech contract.

It was liberating to drive off in it, leaving behind the benighted van that ruined used cars for us. Normally I would have been all nostalgic about leaving one car for another. Hell, normally I wouldn't have done it at all. I would have continued to drive the car because I hate change and I'm cheap. But I hate being stranded in the middle of nowhere even more, and even a cheapskate like me can see the writing on the wall. When your repairs start to equal a car payment, it's time to move on. Thank goodness for us that we have family who are willing and able to help us actually do that. I don't think I can overstate how much their support means to us.

Minivan of DOOOOOOOM

In November 2007, we had an unfortunate car accident that totaled our minivan and resulted in untold irritation, angst, and inconvenience. The solution to that was supposed to be the replacement minivan, which was pretty much the exact same car, in white, with snow tires and all-wheel drive. The only problem was--and has been--that it has had this weird cluster of electrical system problems. Randomly, the car won't start or the instrument panel will go out or the dashboard indicators will go nuts. It used to be that this happened every six weeks or so, but lately it's been more or less every day.

The day before our trip up north, the instrument cluster completely crapped out. Please note that this was the same car that refused to start on the second leg of our last year's vacation, requiring us to leave it in Missoula with understanding relatives who lent us their car. This year, we didn't take any chances and just rented a car. (You know, with all the awesome money we have from unemployment. We are the mythical welfare queens of Reagan's fevered racist and classist dreams, driving around in a Nissan Armada. Take that, Gipper!) We left the car at a Chrysler dealership in Bozeman and hoped for the best.

They "fixed" it, but because it is an intermittent problem, it isn't staying fixed. In fact, it's getting worse. The instrument panel goes out once a day, and/or it won't start. (Oh, FYI, if you have a cranky, electronically shitty Chrysler Minivan of DOOOOOM, you too may be able to make it start by whaling on the dashboard! Better living through violence!)

Honestly, I don't think I require that much of my cars. I'd like them to start in the morning and take me the places I want to go without randomly dying and/or scaring the crap out of me by having two of its computers stop communicating with each other. Our Saturn, Indy, has been a sterling example of this, happily revving to life morning after morning and reliably transporting me, my family, and our shit when we require it. Tell me, am I asking too much? (And should I be knocking on shitloads of wood right now to avoid Indy dying on us, too?)

In college, my cousin Amy and I had a pact to try to have one car between us that ran. Given that our cars were a mid-80s Chevy hatchback and a 1982 Peugeot or 1972 Mazda, this was not as easy as it sounds. There were many times that one of us would tow the other to a repair facility, only to have to be towed a week later by the newly repaired car. Ha! Good times! But you know, in college--at least for me, who worked, lived, and studied on campus--who really cared? So we had to walk downtown instead of taking the car. Big deal!

It's a lot harder now. We have to get where we have to get, and the fact that we live 30 miles from the next "big" town--the one where most of the shopping and, hey, jobs are--makes a reliable car hugely important. Which means that we are actively looking for a new car now, even though I can't think of a time that would be worse for us to buy a car. Ha! More good times! Luckily, we have a supportive family, including my father, who has offered to take the Mo'D on a flatbed truck to whatever dealer we want to try to gift it to so that we can be sure it meets the "must be running" standard of the Cash for Clunkers program. What would we do without family? I hope I never have to find out.

Meanwhile, what cars do you recommend? We're looking at Subarus (Impreza wagons and Foresters) and Hyundais (Elantra wagons and Tucsons) mostly, but we're open to suggestions. We are going to be sad to lose the room but not the doooooooooooom.

Moving along

For the past two months, I've been in crisis mode, feeling as if every moment of every day needs to be filled with solving the problems that have arisen from Chip's layoff. I've come to realize that I can't do that anymore. So today, instead of looking for jobs or working or writing or cleaning the house or stressing about bills, we took a walk with Emerson on the new walking trail that recently opened near our house. The sky was just getting ready to open up into a thunderstorm, and we talked and laughed and planned and enjoyed Emerson's great new noises. It was a much better way to spend a half an hour than staying at home and fretting would have been.

This situation, I've accepted, is not going to be solved tomorrow. There just aren't a lot of jobs out there at the moment, and those that are out there are flooded with applications like never before. Getting a (good) job in Montana is tough at the best of times, so I am not sure why I thought everything would be back to normal by the end of July (the cut-off date for the company insurance). It's going to be a slog, and I have to get used to that.

Part of getting back into "real" life for me is trying to get back to blogging. I just haven't felt that I could justify the time it takes to post regularly. I can find the time, and I need to. Just as I need to find the time for walks in the pre-rain.