Death Comes for Young Bertram

Hypochondria Gratified at Last

Sooo ... my new doctor doesn't like the sound of my cough. I get the smoking lecture and a lab order for an x-ray. I go back to see the doctor and he says there's a shadow on the x-ray of my left lung; he's worried I might have a touch of pneumonia, wants me to take two antibiotics til the bottles are empty. I go to the pharmacy, where the pharmacist says, "Whatever your doctor thinks you have, he wants to get rid of it fast." So I go home, take the pills faithfully til they're all gone, 12 days, just as instructed.

Again as instructed, I wait two weeks after completing the antibiotic regimen and go back for another chest x-ray. That was Friday. Monday morning at 8:05 the doctor calls me and tells me there is still a "spot" on my x-rays. He says I have two options. 1) Get a CT Scan immediately to determine exactly what is throwing a shadow on my chest x-rays. 2) Wait a while--say, two months, get another x-ray and see if the spot has grown. The doc knows I have no health insurance and that I am unemployed; knows, in fact, that I am as broke as an orphan's heart. So he is not surprised when I respond, It looks like option 2.

Now, I am not a hypochondriac in the strictest sense of the word but I do have a rather suggestible nature in that area. And I am dead certain I have lung cancer. There's not a doubt in my mind. And I'm just about obsessing on this. All week I've been thinking about putting my affairs in order. Updating my will; drawing up an advance directive; pondering where I want my ashes spread. And like that.

My bride is still driving me to take immediate actions to structure a future I just don't foresee. But here I am, sending out resumes, applying for grad school. It's all pretty strange. After a lifetime of mordant humor, morbid musing and tempting fate with the certitude that I am immortal, well, gee ...

The good news of course is that I have made a lot of mistakes in my life—been wrong about just about everything except politics. So I'll probably be wrong about this too. Come late November I'll be happily embarrassed when it turns out I ain't dying anytime soon.

Adventures in Representative Democracy

In solidarity with the public employees of Wisconsin, Ohio and elsewhere in this great land of ours ...

Joe Hill, alive

Joe Hill, dead

Twat's happening

I am a convert. After much scorning I have embraced Twitter. And I'll tell you why.

1. Nobody on Twitter has even mentioned Farmville, let alone bugged me about helping them with a sack of seed.
2. Ditto, Mafia Wars—whatever the hell that is. Don't know, don't care. Stop it already.

3. I don't have to claim Rachel Maddow or Jon Stewart and I are friends. I just click "follow" and I get previews of their shows, insights into their thinking about public affairs.
4. I can actually position myself to hear what Bernie Sanders, Nancy Pelosi, Al Frankin, Tom Udall, Sarah Silverman and Bill James have to say. And I can get previews on what Gail Collins, Paul Krugman and Joan Walsh will have in print tomorrow.
5. Nobody on Twitter tells me Happy Birthday; nobody expects me to remember theirs.
6. I can follow somebody without having pictures of their adorable children, grandchildren or the offspring of someone else's friend just randomly showing up on my little piece of internet real estate.
7. On those rare occasions when I actually have something to say—and this, to be honest, is precisely the reason I was most scornful of Twitter — I find that hammering my thoughts down to 140 words or less is a constructive exercise demanding brevity and clarity over eloquence. For me, this is a useful and instructive constraint.

Or related field

Even casual readers of the Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher Ed and I don't even know how many blogs and other publications in the field can find tons of verbiage on how beleaguered and deprecated are the "liberal arts." Well, don't I know it. The situation is no joke. Or wouldn't be, except that these philosophers, administrators and purveyors higher education seem not to have noticed that a bachelor's degree in the liberal arts does not qualify their own graduates for employment by the very institutions the represent.

See, I know this because for over a year I have been looking for work in higher education with a lowly bachelor's degree in Political Science—augmented by years of work experience and the fruits of an habitual continuing education that vastly exceed anything presented to me by my beloved Alma Mater.

On top of that, I've been a journalist, a businessman, a manager of men and women, a teacher, a laborer, a designer, a salesman, a customer service ace, a hack writer—even a marketing consultant. And over the years I have read broadly and even deeply in the sciences, the humanities, history and, of course, politics. But it seems my only hope of landing a job in academe is for someone somewhere to decide that "or related field" in the required education statement is so broad it even encompasses political science.

It seems at this remove ironic that I once believed political science was the best academic program on offer. After all, I reasoned—and was told by my favorite professors—poli sci required studies in philosophy, history, sociology, statistics and the law, and relied upon constant reading and the composition of the most lucid prose. Who could hope for a better education in the liberal arts than a political science major? Who, indeed.

And the fact is, I still believe that. By studying poli sci I got in-depth exposure to a truly marvelous range of academic disciplines. Sure, I wish I'd come to understand calculus while at college, and wish my keen interest in the sciences had asserted itself before my late thirties. But I can't fault the political science department for my math-phobic personality nor my late-blooming intellectual hunger.

I can, though, fault the higher education establishment for hewing to a human resources norm that requires narrow studies in specific fields to qualify well-educated individuals to do generalist work in generalist fields. I am extraordinarily qualified for at least ninety percent of the jobs I choose to seek, a competent to perform all of them.

Admittedly, the "extraordinarily qualified" part is largely a result of my vast experience and alert approach to life and work ... but the "competent to perform" part is, as it should be, the product of a sound education in the liberal arts. And it seems to me that institutions in the business of selling a liberal arts education ought to be willing to hire their customers.

By the way—lest anyone thing I'm just picking on colleges and universities, let me also note for the record that I have been very disappointed by "microfiber" cloth; it just hasn't lived up to the hype.

Completely off topic

I enjoy ballroom dancing. And I never miss Dancing with the Stars, almost always vote. I even vote for contestants I don't particularly like, provided they dance well or at a minimum show steady improvement.
Every season the voting public makes some poor choices—the contestants sent home the first weeks are almost always inexplicable eliminations, for example. But this season, the 11th has been especially aggravating. I blame the Vote-Bristol-Palin-Every-Week-Anyway crowd. How else to explain the elimination in the past four weeks of Audrina, Rick and Brandy—each of whom were really showing skill, grace and progress as dancers—while pro Mark Ballas gives Bristol kindergarten level choreography and still has to steer her around the stage like a grocery cart.

Of course, it's not all just people voting who either know nothing or care nothing about dance. The judges also screwed up royally on Monday night when they scored Maksim and Brandy's incredible first dance a 27—and then mercy-scored a graceless, pedestrian dance from Mark and Bristol precisely the same. That set up the ensuing travesty: Last night Brandy was sent home; Bristol is going to the finals. Give me a break.

A recent study shows that

I've been looking for work since, oh ... forever. OK, really only 19 months! A ghastly process of hard labor animated by mandatory optimism in the face of serial crushing rejection.

On the plus side, I've learned a lot. And by this I refer not to my fresh acquaintance with poverty and the constant scramble to keep groceries in the larder, fire in the furnace and light in the lamps; nor to the thrill of living without health insurance at my age, with all my prescriptions. I don't even mean the full, rich flavor of shame that I am brining home no bacon for my bride and leeching money from every pocket I can slip my sweaty palms into. No. In fact it is myself I've learned so much about through this. Even though I've been right here in front of me, so to speak, all along, there was just a whole lot about me I'd never really noticed.

See, I have been writing letters to perfect strangers—often whole committees of strangers, in fact—explaining to them why they should hire me. This has necessitated a great deal of reflection upon what I have done over the course of my life, what skills I have acquired, what I have accomplished, and how. This reflective process has carried with it the corollary inventories: what I have not learned, what I have failed to accomplished, and why not.
Yes, all this has been enormously instructive; indeed, so instructive  that I wish I had gone through this ordeal years ago.

As with anyone in this situation, no doubt, my ruminations have hardly been confined to the professional aspects of my life. Working on a sales pitch for myself involved also examinations of my strengths and my weaknesses. Almost surprising me, I find that I am not ashamed. By the same token, I am convinced that I have avoided arrogance on very solid grounds.

About which more later.

Advice from a wall