Nebulous Mooch

My husband has a CD by a popular Congolese musician that he listens to all the time. He especially likes the vocals. So he’s decided to learn to sing one of the songs phonetically.

The other night he happily sang it to me. He learned it in the car driving to and from gigs. “What do you think?” he asked. He was looking very pleased with himself.

“Very good,” I said.

He explained to me which parts were difficult to learn. Then he sang it again. “Maybe I’ll sing it on a gig.”

When I asked him what it meant, he said that he had no idea. How could he consider singing something in public if he has no idea what it means? “It could mean anything,” I told him. “You could be singing kill whitey.” We laughed.

I think he’s still determined to sing it on a gig. I just hope no Congolese people are in the audience when he does.

We have new neighbors. They’re a family–a mother, father, and two small children. They’re quiet and better than other neighbors we’ve had. There’s just one problem. They smoke.

In cheaply made apartments like the ones we occupy, noises seep through the walls along with smoke. The smoke is mostly evident in the bathroom. One day, my husband went into the bathroom and came out coughing dramatically.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“Smoke. Our neighbor smokes.” He poked to the bathroom door that he’d pulled tightly closed behind him. While I had on many occasions seen the mother happily puffing on a cigarette, I didn’t know what that had to do with our bathroom.

Thinking he must be over reacting, I opened the door to check. If I didn’t know any better, I’d have thought that my husband had just smoked a few cigarettes in there.

The strangest part is that the smoke seems to come up through the drain in the sink. I picture our neighbor standing in the bathroom blowing puffs of smoke down the drain as her children nap quietly in the next room.

We’ve solved the problem by keeping the bathroom door shut. Whenever we need to use it, we just hold our breath.

With the price of gas soring, I have a renewed interest in electric cars. When I wrote this, the price of crude was $93.62. That’s very high. The value of the dollar continues to fall. Believe it or not, I keep track of these things — that’s how committed I am to knowing about gas prices. This shows the oil price per barrel in real time.

Don’t you feel scared!

This is why I troll You Tube for videos about how to build your own electric car. Imagine never having to stop at a gas station again. That would be a dream come true.

Recently, I’ve developed a new habit. It reflects my natural curiosity–my need to know. I look up people I know on the property appraiser’s website. If they own a home or condo and I know their last names, I look them up.

This might not seem interesting to most, but I like knowing how much someone paid for their home. Before I learned that I could just look it up, I used to wonder. It’s not something that’s considered polite to ask, especially if you don’t know the person that well. I can speculate but speculation isn’t as good as hard fact.

Now I can go to someone’s house for dinner, already knowing that they paid under $100,000 for their home 5 years ago and it’s almost tripled in value since. I know the home’s square footage, age, composition, and what work they’ve had done (if they’ve gotten the proper permits). It takes every ounce of self control not to tell them I know.

The most shocking thing about my new found knowledge is knowing what people pay in taxes. Some people pay as much as I earn in a year in taxes! Is that a reflection of how little I earn or how high taxes are?

On Monday we went to a friend’s house for dinner. We’d never been to their house before so my husband was supposed to call them to get their address. I had him call as a courtesy. But we didn’t really need their address; I’d already looked them up on the property appraiser website.

Last week I wasn’t feeling well, so my husband went running in the morning without me. When he got home he said he ran so fast that he had to run further than we usually do to make the run last the full twenty minutes. He was so happy to tell me that.

Today just when I was about to give up—running is still very hard for me—I took off like a cheetah and ran very fast for five full minutes. “This is the normal speed I run,” he said, running after me. “You better slow down before you overdo it.”

I kept on running, leaping over puddles like a gazelle. I can run too. I can run fast. I didn’t pass out until we got home.

I walked into the living room and my husband was sitting on the floor with his head in his hands. His wallet had exploded all over the floor. The carpet was littered with all kinds of cards: business cards, credit cards, and a new mysterious gold Medicaid card.

About a month ago, we received a Medicaid card and a letter in the mail saying that my stepson may or may not qualify for Medicaid. This is particularly entertaining because we never even applied for Medicaid. The letter basically said that the card may or may not be valid. It made it seem like we should just take the card to the doctor’s office and try it out. Maybe will have to pay full price for a visit. Maybe we won’t have to pay anything at all.

My husband promptly called Medicaid to find out what was going on and was told that my stepson did qualify and that we would get information in the mail about HMO’s. About two weeks later we received a letter telling us we had thirty days to pick an HMO. I did some research on the web to try to figure things out and didn’t get very far. My stepson needs to see a physical therapist and we need to find a plan that will cover that.

A few days after that letter arrived a woman called asking my husband for a bunch of personal information about my stepson. Eventually this woman identified herself as a support coordinator and said that my stepson qualified for CMS. CMS provides special services for children who have more medical needs than most. She said that she would call us back to give us more details about CMS.

A few days after this call, we got a letter from Medicaid saying that they picked a HMO for us already. When husband called to inquire about this the woman on the phone said, “You didn’t choose a health plan within the thirty days so one was assigned to you.”

“It hasn’t been thirty days since, I received the letter,” he said.

“You didn’t choose a plan within the thirty days,” she repeated.

We haven’t heard back from this support coordinator person. No one we call knows anything about what’s going on. The system is almost impossible to navigate. By the time we get this straightened out we’ll be moving to England.

I was watching Nightline last night and they had a story that featured this website.

The ways to decorate a home are as varied as the people decorating those homes. Some people want to paint their walls black, some want to cover everything in their house with gold leaf. It’s all fine with me. There is one thing that I’ve never understood–doll collecting.

If you collect dolls maybe you can enlighten me because I’ve never understood the appeal. Earlier today I was in the home of a doll collector. The whole time I was there, porcelain baby dolls with pink painted on mouths and unbelievably rosy cheeks stared at me through blue glass eyes. It was creepy.

How could you sleep in a bedroom with shelves and shelves of dolls looking at you? Haven’t these people ever watched a horror movie? Don’t they know that dolls can come to life in the night and try to kill you?

Not too long ago, I worked in a day program for the mentally disabled. There was a man in the program, I’ll call him Bob, who was afraid of dolls and rightly so. One day we went to a folk museum and I couldn’t find Bob. Okay, I admit it, I lost him. After looking around the museum frantically, I finally found him in a small room with a giant doll display. Behind glass on all of the walls were dolls from all around the world. A voice played through a speaker in the ceiling and talked about each doll as it was lit up by a light. In the center of this room was Bob with his arms crossed tightly across his chest. He was muttering, “They can’t hurt me,” over and over. When he saw me he said, “They can’t hurt me, right?”

“Right,” I said. “They can’t hurt you. They’re behind glass.” But what if they weren’t, I thought.

Sitting in that house today, I understood how Bob felt in that doll display. I’ve seen the ads in magazines for ceramic dolls that look just like real babies. I sometimes wondered who would buy such a thing and what they would do with it. Now I know.