Lifelong learning

So what, if anything, did we learn from last week’s medical misadventures, in the most practical sense?

We had been told when we toured the hospital that the maternity ward had free WiFi, and knowing this we brought our trusty little netbook when we embarked Wednesday morning, just in case. Given how the baby-having didn’t happen and instead there was much sitting around and waiting, we were ultimately glad we did. We also learned that the free WiFi, while theoretically extant, was also very spotty and unreliable. So that’s good to know for when Big Announcement Day finally does roll around.

We learned that the little guy does not necessarily break down into a tantrum-y mess if he happens to wake up on a random weekday and be greeted not by mommy or daddy, nor even grandma or pop-pop, but rather one of mommy’s friends whom he kinda-sorta knows but might not recall the name of. This was in fact incredibly gratifying to verify. We had hoped as much, because our contingency plans hinged on it, but still, we worry. Of course, this week we’ve been up to our eyeballs in tantrum-y messes because it’s as if someone flipped a switch in the little guy’s head which illuminated for him the very textbook definition of “Terrible Twos” and that has been a bit of an ordeal (arguably that’s been the one thing mentally dominating me this week, so it’s just as well that I’ve spent every day so far blogging about the Kidney Stones Saga, which is far more pleasant to dwell upon, take that as you will) but one axiom which has made itself manifestly clear is this: the little guy is at his absolute worst when he is alone with his mother or father (or both). He acts out only in very small, manageable ways with his grandparents, and almost never at all with babysitters or the teachers at daycare and so on. And on the one hand, the fact that he saves up all his inappropriate behavior just for us is grueling to deal with (even if in some ways I think it’s all right if it reflects that we’re the people he’s most attached to and feels safe deviating from the script with) BUT the bright side is that we have one less thing to worry about if we bolt for the hospital in the middle of the knight. OK, two less things: nobody else will have the little guy’s adorably ugly side inflicted upon them while doing us a solid, and as long as we’re gone, we won’t have it inflicted on ourselves, either.


Just getting up and out of the house last week was a good dry run, so on the one hand we learned that we were pretty well-prepared for that and also learned what we could do to be even more ready for the real thing. (One of my favorite examples being that I need to have a couple of soothing, familiar CDs in my car to listen to so that the drive to the hospital isn’t fraught with quiet anxiety. As opposed to the usual collection of CDs in my car which all generally belong to the punk and heavy metal “aggressive screaming” genre which is not recommended for women having contractions.) As soon as my wife got home from the hospital last Thursday we started making a list of things to bring to the hospital and gathering them all together to be packed sooner than later. But on the obverse side of the coin, we learned we really weren’t ready to actually, you know, bring a baby home from the hospital. The list of things that still need to be done around the house, to not only get the nursery ready but get the whole place acceptable to receive well-wishers who’d like to meet our new daughter … yeah that list is significantly longer and immeasurably more intimidating. But apparently we (read: I) needed the wake-up call, and it has been duly registered, and this coming weekend will no doubt be busy. But it’s the golden second-chance kind of busy, so I’m totally OK with it.

The best part is that when the little girl’s birthday does arrive, we’ll apply the lessons learned from the Kidney Stone Saga and then have the joy of discovering an entirely new set of unforeseen head-slappers as we go along anyway. And while we’re still not one hundred percent ready, we seem to have made it to the significant marker of the end of March. As of tomorrow the baby can be born in April like she’s supposed to and somehow we will manage. Nothing really learned in that, just another example of being lucky.

Palliative care

My wife, upon reading my blog post on Monday, made the observation that it was very much a straightforward recounting of events rather than my own personal reactions to or analysis of those events or any of the other variations on thoughtfulness I generally strive to bring to bear. And, you know, fair enough. Partly that’s because the whole Saga of the Kidney Stones was a long and convoluted sequence of events which I felt were interestingly noteworthy in and of themselves, like our own little version of an episode of House or something. And partly it was because interpretation seemed a little hard to come by under the circumstances.

It definitely was not a day for subtle shadings on the emotional palette. It started out with very broad panic – about making arrangements for the little guy and getting to the hospital with the clock ticking, about the relative health of a baby born too early, about enduring a difficult labor – which was steadily replaced by a very broad relief as one by one those concerns proved either handleable or non-applicable. And somewhere in the middle was one of the most acute feelings of despair I’ve had in a long time, and the reason I didn’t weave that into my initial retelling was because it’s not terribly pleasant nor is it terribly illuminating. It just sucks. “It” in this case refers to the feeling you get in the pit of your stomach when you know that someone you love is suffering and there is absolutely nothing you can do about it. Being told that my wife was not in fact in early labor but rather was experiencing the pain associated with kidney stones basically had the effect of banishing a whole cloud of disparate anxieties and replacing them with a single overriding concern, which was to get my wife some relief. But it was out of my hands. Nothing I could say or do would interrupt the anguish that was literally contorting her face and then her entire body. I knew that it was very temporary at worst, but that didn’t make the moment-to-moment of watching her in pain any easier. Like I keep saying, though, I don’t think I went through anything unique or have any special insight as a result. It happened, and it was terrible (for me heart-wise and much moreso for my wife pure physical are-you-kidding-me agony-wise) and then the painkillers were administered and the worst was over. But even now I’m well aware there are far, far worse things that can befall a person. I won’t tempt fate by naming them, but I’m grateful that I was in a position where there was nothing I could do but there was plenty modern medicine could and ultimately did do, once someone with access to the drug cabinet realized that possibly screwing up later tests was a risk worth taking to ameliorate the situation. If I had been in a position where there was nothing I could do and nothing anybody else in the world could do either … yeah, probably best not to think about that. Look, Muppets!


What else did we learn from our most recent trip through the halls of the healing sciences? That it always seems like doctors have someplace else they think they need to be whenever they manage to spend five minutes at your bedside many hours after you show up looking for medical attention? That nurses are overworked and underpaid and do all the important stuff and don’t get enough credit for it? That hospital food is crappy? What is this, a blog or a tepid stand-up routine from the late 80’s? (And as it happens, in the case of the specific hospital we were in, only the first two statements are true. My wife couldn’t say enough good things about the food she ate – which was made to order! – during her stay.)

So yeah, there was plenty of overfeeling during the entire escapade, but all of that boils down to stuff that’s simultaneously so universal it doesn’t need explanation and so me-specific that it doesn’t merit much attention. The usual overthinking was simply not in evidence, again because either things were moving so fast there simply wasn’t time or because during the slower moments it seemed like everything around us was extremely well-covered territory.

Which is not to say I didn’t learn anything at all from the whole ordeal, but I reckon I will save that for tomorrow. Yes, this is proving to be a monumentally uneventful week, such that I can fix my posting gaze firmly upon last Wednesday and Thursday and know that I am not missing catching any of you up on anything more recent. I’m sure we’ll get back to the typical as-it-happens perspective at some point, though.

Productivity metrics

I mentioned yesterday as I was wrapping up the post that things were getting back to normal if not already there. One of the more easily grappled-with aspects of normalcy, of course, is the whole job situation, so allow me to elaborate on that a bit more.

My wife was supposed to work every day last week through Saturday, with the exception of Thursday, although she was expected to attend a mandatory work dinner on Thursday night, something she was entirely unenthused about. Of course all of those expectations and supposed-to’s pre-dated the kidney stone hospitalization, and in the aftermath the schedule had been modified significantly. Obviously she didn’t go to work on Wednesday, and although she was discharged from the hospital fairly early on Thursday she was excused from the dinner meeting as well. Friday became a day off, too, and apparently could have easily become the effective Day One of her maternity leave as far as the office manager was concerned. However, there really was no medical reason for my wife to stop working altogether; she hasn’t been banished to bed rest or anything like that, merely advised to drink as much water as humanly possible and perhaps avoid excessively calcium-rich foods in addition to discontinuing her straight-up calcium supplements. (This might not seem like a big deal, and in the grand scheme of things probably isn’t, but since she gave up caffeinated coffee and tea during the pregnancy my wife has been using hot cocoa as a placebo, and Swiss Miss prides itself on being high in calcium.)


Also it’s more or less understood that my wife will only take about three months maternity leave, total, so every day not punching in now is one day sooner she’d have to punch in when the baby is only a couple months old. So the office manager’s heart was in the right place, trying to tell my wife to just stay home and relax and stay healthy and let her colleagues worry about covering appointments and whatnot; she just didn’t think through the whole truncated post-partum leave angle the way my wife did, and thus my wife graciously declined.

So by Saturday she was back to work, though only for a half day, and Sunday had already been scheduled as a day off, after which she’d be on Monday through Wednesday. Those weekdays have been reduced to half-days as well. We shall see what happens on Friday and beyond, but mainly it’s highly comforting to feel like my wife’s employer has her personal well-being somewhere on their list of priorities. They were accommodating about hiring her while she was pregnant with the little guy and bringing her onboard just as she was transitioning from her first ever maternity leave, and they’re still accommodating for baby number two. There are myriad things about the job that drive my wife (and me, by proxy) crazy, but now and then we’re reminded that in many ways it really is a positive place to work.

My work schedule, on the other hand, is a bit more rigid on a day-to-day basis, so basically I had to burn a couple of paid days off for Wednesday and Thursday last, then come back for a full day on Friday and for the foreseeable future. This leaves me, as of today (which is one of the two Tuesdays per month when leave time accrues) with a little over one day of paid time off to my name. I think that might actually be to my benefit, in a weird way. All along I’ve been thinking of my paternity leave as essentially unpaid, because it was always going to be longer than however much leave I could accrue plus life has unexpected ways of forcing my hand on using leave time, anyway. And I had been mentally rolling around the idea of writing my boss an email and preemptively explaining that although I had three days off coming to me I’d just as soon take every single day of paternity leave as unpaid FMLA, and come back in two or three weeks, and keep the three days in the bank … because I’ll need three days off for travel and various activities associated with my wife’s brother’s wedding in mid-June. I think that’s a reasonable way to handle everything but I still just instinctively recoil at the thought of having to outline those kinds of number-crunching machinations for official approval.

If my wife were to go into labor the morning of Friday, April 8th, she’d be one day shy of 39 weeks and that would feel just about right (apparently her doctor doesn’t want her to go all the way to 40 weeks anyway). I could burn a leave day on Friday, which would not only complete the week but the pay period, and then I’d take the next two or three weeks off unpaid, and then start accruing again when I came back. Which would not get me up to three days in the bank by mid-June, more like only two, and so I’d have to get permission to go into a negative balance for leave at that point. I have a hard time explaining why the thought of that conversation bothers me less than the hoarding-leave-for-later conversation, but so it goes. If any other sequence of events prevails, from the baby being born on a Wednesday to staying put past her due date, I’d rather just take it all unpaid and sort out my leave balance when I get back. But we shall see.

The other element which I fully do not expect the baby to take into consideration is my imminent office relocation. It seems almost definite now that my group will be heading to Crystal City on or around April 21st or 22nd, which seems highly likely to be one or two weeks after the baby comes, meaning I will still be on paternity leave and I will miss it. Some people might view that as a blessing but I would be slightly bummed. Associated with the move will be at least one or two days where everyone wears jeans to the office in order to pack, as well as one or two (or many many more) days when the new computer network is non-functional and there’s little to no work getting done. It almost seems unfair to be home doing nothing and not getting paid when my colleagues are at the office doing nothing but very much getting paid. Ah, well. Being home with my entire family has a certain value that transcends the usual paycheck-earning, at that. It’s just going to be odd, maybe even downright surreal, if I pack up most of my work stuff in advance, then stop showing up one day because my wife went into labor the night before, and then come back to a completely different cubicle/office/building/neighborhood a week after everyone else has already settled into the new digs. But there are worse fates, I suppose.

Ouch

Went a bit off the rails there last week, didn’t I? As I’ve said many times before, I do my best (or, of late, only) blogging while I’m at work; last week I didn’t go to work either Wednesday or Thursday and although I was back to the physical trappings of my regular routine as of Friday, I wasn’t mentally prepared for posting. So sorry about the near-week of silence, and apologies in advance for the fact that this week may be wildly off-model as I try to regroup and catch up.

So we had an unexpected mid-week hospitalization, which started out looking like one thing and ended up quite another. My wife woke up in the wee hours of Wednesday morning with painful contractions, and to her eternal credit she laid awake in bed beside me for a good half hour trying to ascertain if they were real contractions or not before going into full-blown panic mode. She has gone through labor before, and her ability to recognize true, laboring contractions isn’t really in dispute, but at the same time the previous and to date only time she’s been in labor it was artificially induced, so there’s an unavoidable amount of uncertainty in the mix nonetheless. On top of that, she is group B strep positive which means, by the book, she should be at the hospital on antibiotics for four hours before delivering for the baby’s sake, so there’s an added incentive to avoid being overly dismissive of anything that might possibly be labor. Point being, the contractions didn’t go away between 3:30 a.m. and 4, so she woke me up, and then from 4 a.m. to 5, I handled timing the contractions’ durations and frequency and tried to help my wife remain relatively calm. By 5 a.m., after a dozen minute-long contractions that were occurring with dependable five-minute regularity albeit way more painful than my wife remembered from last time, we felt justified calling the doctor, who instructed us to head on over to the hospital.

So we were fairly efficient about getting ourselves ready and also finding a friend to come over and wait for the little guy to wake up and get him ready and off to daycare, and we were on the road a little before 6 a.m. and in the hospital not too long after. The labor and delivery nurses were in the midst of changing over from night shift to day shift crew, but still reassuringly competent about getting us squared away. They got my wife hooked up to some monitors in the triage room, which is SOP before sending the mother on to an actual labor room – presumably, one imagines, this is standard in order to weed out the women who show up believing they are in labor when really they aren’t, and fair enough for that. You would think, given the reasonable restraint we exercised in assessing what was happening, we would pass right through fairly quickly. But here’s the kicker: my wife was not actually in labor. Just tremendous pain.


The pain, it was soon theorized, was due to kidney stones. And on the one hand, this was actually very good news. Had it actually been labor, the baby would have been born about three and a half weeks pre-term, which certainly is not the end of the world (her big brother was induced two and a half weeks pre-term) but is also less than optimal. We were also down one local set of grandparents, who were mid-vacation in Ireland until Sunday, so juggling the little guy with the new baby’s arrival would have been trickier than we had expected. Plus the agony itself, had it been associated with labor, would have meant hours of really spirit-crushing pain in the attempt to bring the child forth via drug-free delivery. Whereas pain meds for kidney stones were an at-hand source of relief.

The monitoring also brought further good news in the form of strong readings across the board on the baby herself, who was doing fine floating as contentedly as always in her amnion suite, not particularly interested in going anywhere, thanks. But the monitors also said that my wife was not having strong labor-like contractions, and at this point I can only make ill-informed guesses at best as far as what had been going on all morning. When my wife said she was having strong contractions at home I believed her from the get-go, and the fact that she convinced her doctor this was the case as well would have banished any doubts if I had had them. The monitors just told a different tale. Did the contractions subside on the way to the hospital or shortly after arrival, either totally coincidentally or because being stressed about making it there in time was ramping them up and being tended to by medical professionals kind of inherently calmed my wife down? Were they actually weak contractions all along, and either amplified to my wife’s perceptions or warped by crossed neurological signals because of the accompanying excruciating pain? I suppose it doesn’t really matter. We did everything we were supposed to do and we ended up where we ended up.

Which is not where the story ends, of course. So there we were, in labor and delivery triage with the only fact conclusively proven being that my wife was not in labor, which meant we were not going to be moving on to an actual labor room. The kidney-stone diagnosis was more or less a best-guess, which needed to be confirmed via ultrasound, so we had to stay put in triage while waiting for radiology to call us down. And that ended up taking hours and hours, really through no fault of anyone. We just happened to show up at the hospital on a day when radiology was slammed with multiple emergency cases first thing in the morning. My wife’s doctor put in an ASAP order for the u/s, but our nurse eventually figured out that all ASAP u/s cases were getting ignored in favor of STAT u/s cases, which radiology was up to their eyeballs in. So my wife’s case got upgraded to STAT, and the nurse took pity on my wife and gave her some I/V Dilaudid even though the diagnosis was not official at that point. What was official was that my wife was a wreck from the unabated pain at that point, and more power to our nurse for letting that be the deciding factor.

Once the u/s was done and the lab work had come back and my wife’s doctor graced us with a personal appearance, the results were revealed to be … inconclusive. The lab work showed some potential indicators for an infection, but those might have resulted from a contaminated sample, and my wife hadn’t spiked a fever at any point. The radiologist hadn’t seen any stones on the u/s, which either meant there were none or they were small (but still excruciating). Still, the doctor left it up to my wife to choose, either to head home or be admitted for overnight observation. She chose to stay in the hospital where she continued to get I/V fluids, and antibiotics, and had pain medication at the ready (although after her initial dose around 9:45 a.m. and another at 1 p.m., she never felt like she needed any more). I left the hospital around 2:30, as they were about to finally move my wife from the triage stretcher she had been camping out on to a proper room. As it turned out, all the post-partum rooms were occupied so she got an actual labor room, and of the two kinds of rooms in the maternity ward the labor rooms are the really spacious, cushy ones. And while I was picking up the little guy from daycare and getting him through the evening dinner, bath and bedtime rituals, my wife did in fact pass a couple of small (but still excruciating!) kidney stones. Then she spent a fairly restful night in the hospital, and got discharged and came home the next day.

Apparently, since she now has a frame of reference for all three, my wife feels confident asserting that kidney stones are more uncomfortable and more painful than breaking one’s elbow or delivering a baby. Which, if I were really grasping for a bright side, I would take heart in because if I should ever be unlucky enough to develop kidney stones, at least I know my wife won’t roll her eyes at me and mutter something about how surely passing a child through one’s pelvis is more arduous but men are such wusses. (Not that my wife would be inclined to be so callous to begin with.) But the fact is I’m not grasping for a bright side all that much, because I felt like things turned out about as well as could be expected. On the one hand I do not in any way want to discount the raw suffering my poor wife went through. Just from second-hand witnessing, I would not wish kidney stones on 95% of my worst enemies. (That absolute vilest and scummiest 5% better watch it, though.) But all in all, we were lucky many times over. We went from “the baby is coming almost a month early and it looks like the labor is going to be grueling and awful” to “the baby is fine and staying put for now” which was a tremendous relief. The pain itself was terrible, but the source of the pain turned out to be something relatively benign, in the sense that I’ve never heard of anyone dying of kidney stones. And as always my family is lucky to live in the first world within a short drive’s distance of a well-equipped hospital, of which we can take full advantage thanks to decent health insurance, and so on and so on.

All in all it was slightly surreal thanks to the speed with which we went from “things are simultaneously bad and out of control” to “everything’s back to normal” and yet, here we are. My wife is feeling fine now and the whole ordeal seems like a very weird and isolated anomaly. Of course it’s not, really, nothing ever is, but perhaps I’ve babbled enough for one day and tomorrow I’ll talk about some of the ongoing fallout.

Don't philosophize angry

Everybody probably has one or two life lessons they’ve gleaned from experience which they feel could make the world a better place if more people took them to heart. Inspired by some truly absurd trolling I read on a message board today, here are a few of mine:

You do not have the right to live a life free of annoyance. I’m a good American and a supporter of individual rights. I believe in the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. I take great civic pride in the Bill of Rights. But nowhere in any of that, as far as I can see, is an unannoyed state of mind expressly guaranteed. Life in general and other people in particular can be and in point of fact quite often are rather annoying. This is not something which demands redress. You should feel free to find one or more sympathetic ears and grouse about it until you feel better. You should also feel completely entitled to take steps which minimize your own exposure to potential sources of annoyance. What you should not do, under any circumstances, is attempt to hold up your own annoyance as self-sufficient evidence that somehow, somewhere, in some way, the system is broken. If you despise the shrieking sounds of children at play, don’t buy a house near an elementary school. OR, if you have no choice about where you live (and, in all seriousness, sometimes that is legitimately the case), then pursue activities which get you away from home during recess times. OR, if you can’t control where you live and are an invalid, then wallow in bucketloads of self-pity because you can’t escape something so annoying. But as soon as you start suggesting that all children should be isolated in remote education camps from the ages of 3 to 18, because you find kids annoying, you have grossly misapprehended the relative importance of your own inner calm. Which is to say, it is of no importance to anyone but yourself. Do everything in your power to look after it, but do not expect anyone else to do the same. That is not just The Way It Is, but pretty much The Way It Should Be.


There are certain things which exist in the world which should not exist. These are legitimately, universally terrible things. Genocide. Rape. Child Abuse. Religious Intolerance. These things do only harm, and cannot in any sane evaluation be said to have any real worth. Even if they do not affect you directly, if you steadfastly ignore them, their very existence anywhere on the planet makes the world a poorer place. There are other things you might be tempted to tack onto the end of that list as a good punchline, like “Katy Perry.” And I am not one to shy away from irreverent humor, including jokes which compare bloody, horrific ethnic cleansing to disposable pop music. Where I draw the line is the point at which people treat the conflation of those two spheres with utter seriousness. You are not entitled to live in a world where the things you personally do not care for do not exist. Every time I hear someone say “So-and-so just needs to go away forever” (or any of the far more explicit-wish-of-painful-death variants) I grind my teeth furiously. And yes, exaggeration is like humor in that it makes conversation more interesting and doesn’t necessarily mean anything, but for some people this really does constitute only a slight exaggeration of their actual beliefs. It’s not enough for these people that no one is forcing them to download and crank up certain cloying hit singles or buy and read certain stupid vampire romance novels or whatever. It’s not enough that they can turn off the radio if the wrong song comes on or change the tv channel if an ad for the movies based on the books appears. The sheer inconvenience of having to co-exist with anything they dislike is an imposition which they see as unabated suffering, and that in turn will only end when the artist in question is executed and every work of their hand immolated.

Lastly, your own personal expectations really aren’t worth that much, either. The construction “I was expecting A to be like X, but it turned out A was like Y, therefore A is atrocious and anyone who can’t see that is a moron” doesn’t make the slightest bit of sense. I mean, where do I even begin unpacking this mental mess. Why did you have those expectations? Because someone else said so, or maybe specifically because of how something was marketed? Because of past experiences and a belief that history makes the future predictable? Because your expectation was the exact thing you wanted and you felt you were owed it? And even assuming an ironclad justification for holding expectations, and even empathizing to the utmost with the feeling of betrayal that accompanies said expectations shattering, how does that translate to the quality that other, separate human beings with their own expectations and value systems might find in the object? But really the reason this expectation-driven mindset grinds my gears is because it tends to insist that everything in the world can and should be classified by rigid distinctions, and everything can and should conform to the templates of its own classification and must not ever deviate from that. Which sounds like a painfully boring world to live in, to me, in addition to being completely untenable.

So, to sum up, get over yourself. You have not somehow been cheated out of a world in which everything pre-conforms to your individualized worldview, everybody agrees with you, and nothing exists except the things you want. The reason you don’t live in that world is because nobody does. And every time you pine loudly for that never-was world, you sound like an asshole. Assholes just happen to be my absolute least favorite kind of human being, which by virtue of my own philosophy means if you are one, it's a pretty safe bet I'm just going to ignore you.

Rail, rail, go away

It started raining heavily this morning right about the time I got to the Metro platform, which honestly is not that bad as the timing of these things goes. I had a small umbrella in my workbag but if I had been walking through the parking lot when the skies opened up I would have had to get it out in a hurry, and then subsequently would have had to deal with a wet umbrella on the train. As it was I could just stand under the platform canopy which, incidentally (but increasingly relevantly as this story goes along), only extends about half the length of the platform. I walked to the farthest spot still under the canopy and looked in the train about to depart as I did. All the seats were full, and while there might have been some open seats in the tail-end cars, I would have had to leave the canopy’s shelter to find out. I decided, instead, to simply wait for the next train.

And then as it turned out the next train didn’t come along for another fifteen minutes or so, despite the fact that during the morning rush they should run at least every five or ten. During the time when there were no trains in sight, the section of the platform shielded from the elements by the canopy absolutely filled up with bodies. A few brave souls with umbrellas ventured farther down the platform, but most people stayed under cover – which of course meant they were bunching up close to the bottoms of the escalators, and eventually people were coming down and hollering “Move down the platform!” and that is something I will never understand, just in general, the fact that some people can walk into a situation and determine (correctly, even) that things are not quite right but then just draw the conclusion that things are not right because everyone else in the same situation is a total ignoramus who needs to be yelled at and told what to do by the possessor of a more penetrating intellect. Yeah, move down the platform, why didn’t anyone else think of that?

At any rate, another train finally came along and despite a very real possibility that I might not get a seat on that one either based on sheer numbers and my refusal to mow people down to get one, I did get a place to sit. But in less than a minute all the seats were taken and people were still boarding to stand in the aisles. I am positive I have ranted about this before, but if you’re new here or have forgotten, let me break it all down again. I get on the Metro in the morning at the very last/first stop on the Orange Line (notoriously the most crowded of all the commuter-heavy lines). Once the train leaves that terminus it then stops at three more above-ground stations and four underground stations before I get off at the fifth underground stop, right before the train actually crosses into D.C. itself. And the train, in theory, should be picking up more and more riders at every stop. Thus I was somewhat bewildered as to why the Metro driver did not pull into our station, let everyone on the platform get on (or choose not to, as they will) and then close the doors and head back towards the city. Instead, the train sat there at the platform for several minutes, and more and more people made their way from the parking lot to the platform, and more and more people chose to board the SRO train, and then finally the train started heading east, already ridiculously overstuffed.


Of course said overstuffedness did not deter that many people from piling on at the other inbound stations as well; no doubt they had been waiting impatiently on their platforms for twenty minutes or more and were wondering when, if ever, they were going to get to work that morning. A question which was not happily clarified a few stops down the line when the train started holding for long stretches in the tunnels, as the driver explained over the (functional, for once) PA that there was some kind of problem with smoke on the track (???) somewhere in D.C. which necessitated single-tracking of trains in that stretch and backed up service in both directions, not only on the Orange Line but on the Blue Line as well because over that particular stretch of the system Orange and Blue share the same line. So that probably doubled the delay.

The more reasonable, rational part of my brain knows that the bad weather this morning only exacerbated the irritability of the average commuter and didn’t directly contribute to the Blue/Orange delays, but at this point my experience with WMATA’s pervasive ineptitude and generally pathetic incompetence puts more than a shadow of doubt on the idea. It rains, some trains’ wheels get wet, the next thing you know switch junctions are completely malfunctioning and tunnels are filling up with smoke. This does not strike me as altogether implausible.

The one good thing about such a grim commute on a Monday morning is that by the time I reached the office I was suffused with a certain kind of hard-fought weariness. I normally find it hard to jolt myself into a mode of optimal productivity on Mondays, anyway, but when the door-to-door trip takes two hours, I feel I’ve won a major victory just by showing up present and accounted for at all. And anything I actually accomplish is simply gravy. So that makes Monday a little easier to bear.

Rebounding

I had a pretty gnarly cold or bug or something this week which hit its symptomatic crescendo yesterday (fatigue, muscle aches, congested sinuses and chest, hot painful lump in throat, low-grade headache, little to no appetite) but I decided to go ahead and be THAT guy: I came to work anyway. In my defense I covered my coughs scrupulously and I don’t have a lot of face-to-face interaction with people in my office anyway, and hasn’t modern science determined that the day you feel sickest isn’t necessarily the day you’re most contagious anyway? Well, if there’s an agency-wide outbreak, mea culpa. At the moment I have exactly three days worth of Paid Time Off in the bank and can count on accruing one more between now and paternity leave if my wife goes all the way to her due date (although I’ll probably end up taking every single day off for the birth of our child as unpaid leave, because I can, so that I still have time off in the bank for June when I’ll need a few travel days for my brother-in-law’s wedding). So, I made the self-serving call.

I’m feeling better today and I haven’t noticed any mass absenteeism in the rest of the office, so hopefully no harm, no foul. I bring it up here for a couple of reasons. One, if I seemed at all delirious or repetitive in my post yesterday I would ask you to attribute that to the DayQuil talking, please. Given the swimmy state of my head yesterday I probably wouldn’t have blogged at all, except for other mitigating circumstances. I had already written a fair bit of the stuff about The Wise Man’s Fear, but I had lopped it off of the end of what became Wednesday’s post before Wednesday got completely out of control. And the little guy’s Three Little Pigs game didn’t necessarily make a ton of sense to begin with, which is entirely the point, so that wasn’t too much effort to convey. But in tying it all together and finishing it off, I may have gotten somewhat muddled.

Two, although I am feeling better today I do not have a mostly-written post waiting for me that only needs a little bit of extra embroidery. I have, in fact, got nothin’, and it looks like that’s what you’re going to get, too, all of the above notwithstanding. But the weekend begins very soon and I will no doubt get up to some wacky high jinks therein, so the source material reserves will be replenished by Monday.