Waiting Room Woes

It took me a while to find the right waiting room in the hospital.

Me: Can you please tell me where the waiting room for nuclear multi-syllable chromosomal stratospheric endocrinal-catheterization is?

Random person wearing a white coat in the hospital: Follow the green line

Me: Which one?

Random person: The one on the floor

After following the green line for 45 minutes I ended up at a garbage dump full of green bins with a big sign on them: “Danger: Radiologic Biologic Morphologic Recycling.” I somehow figured that my friend, who just had a multi-syllabic procedure wasn’t there.

Me: Can you please tell me how to get to the information desk?

Different random person wearing a stethoscope around his neck and carrying a 2 gallon coke bottle in his pocket: Follow the red line

Me: The one on the floor?

Same different random person, now drinking from 2 gallon coke bottle, drooling all over his stethoscope: Of course moron!

After following the red line for 90 minutes I arrived at the information desk, of Macy’s. At that point I discovered that I was color blind, but a nice lady guided me back to the hospital. I eventually found the department of nuclear multi-syllable chromosomal stratospheric endocrinal-catheterization.

Me: Can you please tell me where I can find Isaiah Franklin, my friend, who just had a gastro morphologic orchiectomy?

Nurse carrying a 3 gallon coke bottle: He is doing well but we also had to perform a myringotomy and a diverticulectomy abdominoplasty because he was constipated. He is in room 323. Just follow the yellow line.

Me: I’m sorry, I’m color blind.

Nurse: Second door on the right

Me: Can you also point me to the restroom?

Nurse: Just follow the smell.

Relieved that I had found my way back to the waiting room, I sat in the small room, turned off the annoying TV, which usually advertises discounted gonadectomies, and turned on my kindle for some quiet time. No sooner did I start reading than three incredibly loud women, each one the size of a small Toyota, sat next to me, talking in Spanish, in detail, about their father’s scrotoplasty. To add insult to injury they turned on the TV and started watching La Rosa de Guadalupe in Univision. I pretended I did not speak Spanish to avoid unsolicited conversation about scrotoplasties or Fidel Castro, but I could not help being distracted by the Telenovela. A very big woman was trying to rescue a very young woman from what looked like a very bad pimp. She succeeded but only temporarily. As soon as the very big lady drove away with the very young lady, the very bad pimp telephoned another pimp who brought 98 other pimps to the rescue house, where it seemed like very young girls were rehabilitating themselves from a life of very bad things. The 99 pimps came with very big guns to the house and then there was a very long commercial break advertising Dos Equis beer and all kind of random nonsense with semi-nude women hugging Camaros and the Mexican soccer team selling tortillas.

To distract myself I fantasized: What if I pressed the emergency button by the stretcher next to me? What if I responded to a Code Blue and showed up at the emergency room before the real doctors? (I have only a PhD, which in Jewish families is as good as a high school diploma). What if I walked into one of the rooms and conducted a diverticulectomy abdominoplasty on some random patient? Any of these options would have been better than suffering all the scrotoplasty talk, but my superego took over and I resigned myself to watching La Rosa de Guadalupe. 

As I was getting into La Rosa de Guadalupe the phone of the Nissan next to me started ringing uncontrollably. The phone owner, who was describing in gruesome detail the scrotoplasty to her mother and sister, could not be bothered to answer. The conversation got even louder when the Spanish speaking nurse offered us in the waiting room some Jell-O, which I would never touch because it must have colorant, sugar, and 2987 different kinds of germs. As they swallowed the green Jell-O, my companions asked the nurse how their relative was doing. Displaying great surgical erudition, the nurse went on and on for 45 minutes describing more body parts than you would ever learn in a whole season of Grey’s anatomy. At that point I wanted to have a morphologic orchiectomy myself. Alternatively, I would have swum to Guantanamo for some quiet time.

 

 

 

 

 

Experiences are better than purchases, if you survive them

My latest column from the Miami Herald

My adorable and inquisitive wife Ora, who keeps up with the latest research on well-being, read that experiences are a much better investment in well-being than purchases. Serious studies with more than 2 participants unrelated to the researcher and a margin of error of + or – 0.00385541% show that if you have a little extra cash, better invest in experiences that will cultivate nostalgic moments for the future, rather than in objects. This is provided you don’t get killed or traumatized during one of these experiences.

Investigators have demonstrated that buying things does not improve your well-being much. Experiences, on the other hand, have the potential to improve happiness by providing a source of distorted memories that make family vacations sound idyllic. Study after study prove that buying a pair of red shoes, or a red corvette, does not improve your happiness as much as having a meaningful experience with loved ones.

Persuaded by the research, Ora decided to improve our well-being by having a new experience: Five consecutive days of shopping at Miami’s finest malls.

Day 1: Aventura Mall

Day 2: Dolphin Mall

Day 3: Merrick Place

Day 4: Dadeland

Day 5: The Falls

I tried telling Ora that by the end of day five she would be the only one with memories because I would be dead, but she told me to quit whining and get some extra cash from the ATM in case we maxed out on our credit card. Of course she had a perfectly good excuse to drag me into this. Our son Matan was about to get married during the summer and she insisted that I buy some new clothes to impress my daughter in law’s family. To say nothing of what Ora had to buy for the occasion. It’s not every day we marry our son, and I did need new underwear.

What I thought was going to be just a horrible experience turned out to be a sequence of atrociously traumatizing near-death experiences, which will be very memorable indeed – I give Ora that much. In the first day alone we spent close to 11 hours in Aventura mall buying and returning items in a never ending cycle of hunting for bargains, comparing prices, losing my wife, calling each other on the phone, not hearing the phone because of the obnoxious music in stores designed to replace Guantanamo, matching colors, fighting for a dressing room, dressing and undressing, trying on 53 items, leaving a complete mess in the dressing room, buying items, refusing to get a new credit card from the Banana Republic, schlepping bags to the car, going back to the mall, finding a better bargain, fighting for a dressing room, standing in line behind 27 Brazilian women and 27 nannies maneuvering strollers the size of an SUV, paying, and going to the car to leave the new purchases and retrieve the old ones which Ora decided we needed to return because she found a comparable item for 34 cents less in Chico, which usually charges 0.34% more than Express, which offers discounts on Thursdays and Fridays from 9 to 11 am which are 0.00021% better than the bargains at Ann Taylor Loft.

Meanwhile, I could never find Intimissi underwear, which I usually buy in Europe. If they have it in Europe, I figured they would have it at Aventura Mall, which is the size of Montenegro and Luxembourg combined. To my dismay, no store in Aventura carry Intimissi cotton briefs with elasticized waistband, 93% cotton and 7% elastane. Determined to get the only underwear especially suited for my European anatomy I used my iphone to check the Intimissi website while Ora left me in the husband deposit area of The Loft with other equally comatose males. The Intimissi website listed 29 countries where you can find a store, including Qatar, Croatia, and Saudi Arabia, but the United States of Consumerism was not one of them. Resigned to have to buy online I discovered that you CANNOT BUY INTIMISSI UNDERWEAR ONLINE FROM THE UNITED STATES, which is ground for retaliation and military invasion of whichever country manufactures Intimissi. 

Undeterred by setbacks, I thought that I would be the first one to open an Intimissi store in the US, which would make us rich enough to clone myself and send my alternate ego with Ora to the mall while I schemed a takeover of Intimissi Europe, which led me to ponder some other revenue generating ventures at Aventura Mall that could eliminate unemployment in South Florida.

1.       English school for Brazilian nannies.

2.       Export of nannies to Brazil.

3.       Manners schooling for children of Latin American dictators and drug lords.

 

United in Judgment

Critics of Miami often claim that our city is divided and fragmented. Well, they are wrong. All of us in Miami have something very special in common: We are all judgmental. Hondurans are critical of Salvadorians, Dominicans fight with Haitians, Cubans don’t like to be confused with Puerto Ricans, and the poor Argentineans from Buenos Aires cannot talk to those of us from Cordoba because we are not as erudite, sophisticated, and pretentious as they are. But in times of need, we all come together around something we all love in Miami: plastic surgery. When it comes to flesh and flash, we all lower our defenses, show solidarity, and compare prices between Dr. Buttsky and Dr. Bustos.

No doubt, we need more opportunities to suspend judgment and collaborate, which is not easy. Take me, for example. I try really hard not to be judgmental of people who are judgmental, but if I don’t judge their judgmental attitude, they will continue to judge others, generating in their victims a judgmental attitude that they will perpetuate for generations to come, because, as everybody knows, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree and silicone implants don’t grow on trees.

I believe that change starts within you, which is why I joined Judgmentals Anonymous (JA). After we all recited the prayer and reviewed the 12 steps, it was time for each of us to share our innermost judgmental attitudes. After hearing a litany of sexist, racist, classist, homophobic, ethnocentric, discriminatory, abusive comments about every possible group in Miami, my judgmentalism looked pretty innocuous. “I’m judgmental of people who are judgmental,” I said, to which everybody said I’m not being honest. “Really,” I said, “that’s my problem, I swear.” That did not go down well and they all started judging me for not being honest and insisting that I must harbor some resentment toward some group, some deep seated hatred. “Otherwise you wouldn’t be here” they said. Eventually they kicked me out of the group for being a phony judgmental, which I thought was the worst kind of judgmentalism.

Puzzled by my dilemmas I consulted with Dr. Clearhead from the Department of Philosophy at Cambridge University. I wanted to know how to overcome my negative perceptions of people who are judgmental without perpetuating, at the same time, their judgmental attitude by adopting a passive attitude myself towards their judgmentalism. He told me that this is known as “The Judgmental’s Paradox” and that I should try some plastic surgery instead of worrying about silly things.

Dejected by the lack of psychological and philosophical answers to my dilemma, I decided to ask someone who was pragmatic, fair and balanced, so I contacted Fox News. A spokesman for the organization told me that the best way to overcome my paradox is to repeal Obamacare.

I resorted to some introspection. I tried to remember a time when I was the subject of judgmentalism. Perhaps I had some repressed memories that were bugging me. Perhaps the folk in JA were right after all. Without much effort I recalled the following event, which was, unlike most of the things I write about, true. I was invited to Sydney, Australia, to give a keynote address at a conference. This was soon after I had published a book with a friend on the topic of the conference. After a long day at the conference, I was invited by some local colleagues to have dinner with them. Not all of us had met before, and no sooner did we sit down that we started talking about my book. Professor Magnum (not his real name), who did not know that I was the author of the book, started berating my work big time. While others around the table were trying to motion to him that I was right there, sitting in front of him, he kept talking about flaws in the book. When finally somebody whispered to him that I was one of the authors of the book, he turned beet red and tried to get out of it diplomatically. It’s not like I can’t handle criticism, but the guy had no idea what he was talking about. He was aggrandizing himself and pompously reciting other authors to show off his knowledge. Never mind he hasn’t published anything of importance himself, or ever made the minutest contribution to any field of inquiry. Not to mention he had bad breadth. The guy was a pretentious snobbish arrogant, intellectually inferior academic with no original idea of his own. He reminded me of so many others like him who make a career criticizing others instead of doing something useful themselves. These people are intolerable. I tell you, I can’t stand them!

I wonder if I could go back to JA.