What the doctor should have meant: dishery.diaryland.com

As you might guess, outside of the doctoring lots more women than men work at the hospital, I�d say it�s at least five to one. And since some of these women who work in non-medical capacities have three-digit IQs themselves and will eventually realize Holy cats, I am being treated miserably and I am being paid miserably too and go get other jobs somewhere else, the quest is ongoing for fresh double-digit meat to fill these positions, and this turnover means that a vast majority of female hospital employees are of what the Wife of Bath once described as "prime childbearing age." This is also why very often on the shuttle bus I have to listen to conversations among those in the PCA on such topics as what is the smallest engagement ring you can accept without compromising your self-esteem and how long after you have been dating it�s appropriate to drop hints to your boyfriend as to that magic number lest you both be embarrassed later by something that doesn�t measure up. (Consensus: 1.5 carats, nine to ten months. Now you know!) This is also why very often I cannot find someone I have been looking for, because when I do what I always do and look her up in the handy online phone directory, she�s gone. My reflexive response, honed by many years of work in high-tech and other industries, is to assume that the person I�m looking for has left the company for some reason. But no. Here you must assume that she has gotten married and changed her last name. When I first started at the hosp and oriented myself to said online directory, I wondered why the search function offered the option of sorting by first name, because there are over 2000 people in the directory, and that�s a shitload of Sarahs. Lots of Jessicas, Dianes, and Karens, and besides, how often, in the course of carrying out your workplace duties, are you looking to speak with someone and all you have is a first name? But actually the first-name-search is not only unsuperfluous but necessary, because now when someone I need to speak with is unlisted, I have to search by her first name and hope that she has chosen to be listed by department and/or job function so that I can match her up to what I know her by. (If she hasn�t? Then I have to make a few hi-did-your-name-used-to-be-X calls during which, you can imagine, the caller can�t help coming off like a real dumbass.) I also have to hope that IS has been sufficiently on the ball as to update the listing without having taken it down briefly to, I don�t even know, ponder the change�s existential implications over a two-hour lunch. And what I don�t like � i.e, why I�m bitching � is the implication that these extra steps are my responsibility and that I am required to spend my time taking them. (I know, I know, I�ve got all the time in the world to kill here at Gastro. But what if I didn�t? Work with me, people.) How hard would it be for Sarah X to change her sig file � which if she works at this hospital by the way probably contains at least one misspelling, but that�s another rant � so that for several weeks it read, Please note that my name has changed from Sarah X to Sarah Y. You may wish to update your Contacts list? (Oh, or I guess she�d have to have done that ahead of time, given us a countdown. But whatever! Is that so difficult? I have corresponded with this Sarah during the past few weeks, and maybe I am selfish � I understand from the PCAs on the shuttle bus that planning a wedding is a card you can use to trump the needs and wants of others for up to a year in advance � but couldn�t she have said, "Oh, hey, I�m getting married at the end of next month, and after that my last name�s going to be Y"? The point is, I am not willing to concede that my annoyance is unreasonable.) It�s as if marriage is a station or an achievement that frees good old Sarah from having to deal with its practical consequences � the message is that Sarah�s marriage is worthy of others� inconvenience and wasted time; that Sarah, having gotten married, has earned an exemption from the kind of basic consideration that in similar circumstances would cause her proactively to give the heads-up. I daresay that if Sarah were a nurse, for instance, and transferred from Hematology to Endocrine, she�d change the damn sig file so that her more physically distant colleagues would know where to find her. And it�s not just Sarah, either, the loftiness of the marriage contract is institutionalized, because otherwise IS would require the old address to be kept operative for x amount of time and also for searches on both the old last name and the new to be valid directory entries, would require the creation of an explanatory sig file, etc. If I were in charge of IS and people were getting married at the rate they do around here, that would be a no-brainer. But women are so weird about this shit. Once I worked with a PCA who was in the final sprint of wedding-planning, and she told the IS guys about it in a week or so advance so they could change the profile on her e-mail account. No problem and that was nice of her, right? Think again: she was getting married over a weekend, and when they said they�d make the change for her last thing on Friday, she screamed at them for being philistines, how could they suggest using � invoking � her married name, how could they feel entitled to that, when it would not be her name for another 20-some hours? Had they been raised by animals? Her proposed solution, I am not kidding, was that someone should come in on Saturday evening shortly after the I-do�s would have been pledged and make the change at that more seemly time. Not that she was even going to be sending mail from that account anytime soon anyway, since she was going on her honeymoon. I just don�t get it. Any of it.

The company my sister works for, I found out last week, supplied some of Mariah Carey�s wardrobe in "Glitter." Confidential to Mary: Maybe you want to leave that part off your resume.

My father�s coming to visit on Friday afternoon and, aside from checking the trail conditions on Mt. Pilchuck, I have not done shit. I think this is OK, though, because impending visit + plans to get stinko with Vanessa at the Long Winters show Thursday night (it�s been too long) = plenty of reason to take Friday off and do my laundry, maybe a little cleaning, before I have to be at the airport at five. Which I have informed the interested parties I intend to do. Still I am going to be good and pretty much stay in tonight and tomorrow and get some things in order so that while he�s here I can feel like there�s at least something that�s under my control. HUGE moment a few days ago when via e-mail in the course of blah blah blah I made reference to "Steve, the guy I�m dating." All casually like that, even � am I not a grown-up? I don�t know if I�ve said so here before, I mean not in this incarnation of my diary, but my father and I simply do not discuss personal matters. Maybe that�s why I started watching basketball in the first place. He was living with his girlfriend this past year when he was on sabbatical, and the first I heard that he had such a thing as a girlfriend was six months or so into it when I got a Christmas present from someone named Gail. Um? He never knew the reason I moved to New York, and if he ever heard the name Todd, it wasn�t from me. I don�t even like to talk about my friends or colleagues to him, because he does this thing that makes me feel very uncomfortable where he seizes on the details of these throwaway mentions and then files them away as if in a dossier, so many months down the line he will ask, apropos of nothing, "What do you hear from your friend Cynthia these days?" "Cynthia?" I will ask, caught off guard by a name I haven�t heard and a person I haven�t thought of in ages. "Yes, Cynthia,� he says heartily. "You got Indian food with her once and then went to a trivia game in a bar and got second place. She has a moped and lives in Madrona." My dad has no idea what Madrona is, he couldn�t find it on a map! It�s my family so I am allowed to feel this way, and how I feel is that it�s creepy. And where Mr. Man is concerned it�s just a different flavor of discomfort. Before I learned to clam the fuck up, every phone conversation � and they were more frequent back then � included an tortured exchange that went a little something like this:

My dad: And how is Suzanne?
Does she like her new job? You know, the one at the �
Me (interrupting because, duh, I know where Suzanne works): Oh, she�s fine.
My dad: And is she still dating the same guy? The architect, the one with the houseboat?
Me: Yup, same guy. They went on vacation last month.
My dad: Oh I see. And [pause] how is [longer pause, now with tension in voice] Adam?
Me: He�s fine.
My dad: Adam is fine. That is good to know.
Me: Yes.
My dad (now *very* tense and formal, halting) And is he (pause) enjoying his work �
Me (interrupting) Yes �
My dad (talking over): �as a software developer?
Me: Yes.
My dad (talking over): He�s still a software developer, right?
Me: Yes. Still the same job.
My dad: The same job at the same place.
Me: Yes.
My dad: And he�s doing well.
Me: He�s fine.
My dad: That�s good. [Pause.] Please give him my best. Adam. Give Adam my best.
Me: Will do.
My dad (long pause, then boomingly back to normal): Have you been paying attention to the Mavs lately?

It is not pretty. So for the past several years I have sought to avoid that which obviously he finds unnatural and painful and that which � I�ll be honest � due to his reaction I never really learned how to do anyway so before I decided I didn�t want to do it I already knew I wasn�t good at it; I never bring up boyfriends when I talk to him. He didn�t visit during the Todd era, but on the other hand I�ll be honest again and say that if he had, I would not have considered engineering a meeting, as those historically have provoked tension levels that make the phone conversations seem like musical numbers. But now I am trying to be an adult, I am trying to do something that is in roughly equal parts trying to achieve some kind of emotional d�tente with him and not acting in ways that suggest that the way I live my life is or contains aspects about which I should be strangled and apologetic, Sorry it freaks you out that I grew up � here, I�ll make it better, I�ll do everything I can not to rub your face in it. Sorry, but no. So Steve is on the hook for the Saturday hike (I�m putting together a regular expedition party as a way to diffuse the tension, and exposing my father to actual people with actual characteristics that he can put in his notes and refer to later seems a fair price for that) and maybe for the Sunday brunch at which Vanessa and Popeye will star, and, this is HUGE again, I am not going to alter my behavior and spend nights at Casa Rebecca in deference to my dad's fusty comfort level, I am going to spend evenings with him and when he goes to bed on Atlantic time, I will remove myself to the bacon shack, where I imagine a very nice man will pour me wine and conversationally and otherwise dispel the accumulated stress of My Day With Dad. I will find out what my dad likes for breakfast and I�ll make sure I have it in the refrigerator, and I�ll tune the receiver to NPR so that he can enjoy his mornings, and then a few hours later I�ll come by � unapologetically, because I will have nothing to apologize for � and we�ll do whatever we�re going to do. This I resolve.

Am I going to tell him that Steve and I are moving in together? No no no, no way � are you *crazy*? Have you lost your mind, were you raised by animals? Even in resolution, there are limits.

P.S.: 4 p.m update: I'm not drinking so much on Thursday night after all. Got a call back from Scully and the good news is they want me to come in for a second interview on Friday that will consist partly of live-action FrontPage and editing tests, which no brag but I think I can handle. The bad news is that it's between me and two other people and she says that we all look equally good on paper (hogwash!) and that it is very very close. That's all.