The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Lisa Padol:

#106, 110: Thanks.

I know I'm preaching to the choir, but -- here's another part of why, in an emergency, you will be in a less than ideal state of mind to make decisions about the fates of your loved ones.

Human beings can get used to anything.

Peter Beagle said that at Balticon, explaining that it was one of the strongest elements of horror.

Hospitals are amazingly illustrative of this. When I arrived at the Moses division of Montefiore on Friday, I followed a path lit by eerie blue lights, feeling like I'd wandered into somewhere surreal. I did eventually find the elevator, and that took me to the seventh floor, where my father was.

There was a nurse's station there -- a large desk unit with enough space behind it for smaller desks and for a lot of people. There was a small office in that area as well. There were a couple of hallways with patients' rooms.

Every so often, there were loud beeps of varying pitch and urgency.

Every minute or two, a man's voice could be heard, screaming for help. Every minute or two.

We all ignored this, the same way one might ignore a co-worker's music on the radio, back before everyone had walkmans or ipods and headphones.

It is understandable that someone working in a hospital would tune this out fast. I mean, otherwise, how could one work there?

Is it as understandable that I tuned it out almost at once? Maybe it is. I've been in hospitals and nursing homes before.

I remember television and movies showing hospitals as relatively nice places, all things considered. I mean, sure, there was drama and angst, but the physical environment, especially a patient's room, didn't look that bad. Is this still how hospitals are shown?

Even at the best of times, I find hospitals creepy. And, sometimes, the odors get to me. But, today, that wasn't a problem.

Today, all of the conversations I had with hospital personnel took place standing, wherever we happened to be. Not in an office. Not in the nice waiting room -- and the waiting room was nice enough, and away from most of the noise.

I talked to one doctor on a phone in the hallway of the hospital, carefully taking notes as we spoke.

I talked to the physicians' assistant right by that phone, where she found me.

One isn't supposed to crowd the desk, of course. But, I talked to the social-worker-covering-for-the-usual-social-worker there, and then to the attending physician and a geriatrics physician, and then to the kidney doctor, in succession, at the front desk. That's where I was when other people, doing their best to be helpful, said, "Oh -- you wanted to talk to him / her. Oh, Dr. So-and-So, this is Mr. Padol's daughter."

Now, try making rational decisions or making long term plans or issuing if-an-emergency-occurs instructions for doctors there.

You're standing at the chaotic hub of the hospital floor, with people being as helpful as they can -- really and truly -- while they are also dealing with the usual countless crises and being short staffed. It's an uncomfortable space.

If you indicate that you are done, and the person with whom you are talking leaves, you might not get him or her to come back for one final question any time soon.

And, every minute or two, there's this guy in some room somewhere, screaming for help which he may or may not desperately need, which may or may not be possible to give him -- but which isn't coming any time soon. And every human being in earshot, including you, is ignoring this. You aren't even wondering why no one is helping the poor guy.

After all, he's not the one guy in the hospital you've come to see.

You're used to it by now -- the screaming, the beeping, the feeling like you're in the middle of Grand Central Station at rush hour. Human beings can get used to anything. Anything.

But, that doesn't mean it doesn't affect us.

I am currently furious at my father. I am also quite sorry that he is extremely sick, to the point where his being in MICU is good news.

I learned from one social worker at the hospital that he did actually fill out a health proxy. I know what's in it, because she told me, but she was out when I went to the hospital last, and no one else had time or inclination to look for it so I could copy or photograph it.

My brother would very much like to be able to use my father's money to pay my father's bills, but, as my father didn't set anything up that the bank knows of (probably -- there's one guy who'll be back next week who'll know if special arrangements were made that Dad never informed us about), we will need to get Surrogate Court to grant my brother a temporary guardianship. I'll be calling to ask how we do that tomorrow. My father either did not set up any kind of Power of Attorney in case something happened to him, or he did not let anyone know if he did.

I'll also be calling the nursing home where my mother is, as my father set things up so that no one could visit my mother (who has dementia and is on a ventilator machine) without his presence or at least a call from him, neither of which is going to happen right now. The social worker at the nursing home was sympathetic, but this is a team decision, and her boss was out on Friday.

The law firm my father dealt with did not prepare a will for my father. This probably means that either the will is lost or it is in a safety deposit box. If the latter, my father was unaware of it, believing the law firm he used years ago lost the will. The hypothetical will in the hypothetical safety deposit box would be years out of date -- e.g., made before my mother got dementia. If my father does have a more recent will, he has not told anyone about it.

I had raised the matter of all of these documents back in 2006, when my father spent weeks in the hospital, and then weeks in rehab. I probably raised it before hand. My father either would not talk with me about these matters on the grounds that he was too overwhelmed or would not talk with me about them, saying it was all laid out and not to worry.

Should worse come to worst, I have no idea if he or Mom ever made arrangements for graveyard plots.

I do hope that he pulls through with all of his faculties at least as good as before he went in. Well before, given how much was wrong with him. I truly do. But, I am furious that he did not feel the need to set things up when it was in his power to do so, and I am furious that he waited somewhere between 24 hours and 2 weeks to go to the hospital. (24 hours I can attest to -- he was planning to go into the hospital, but refused to let my brother take him there or call an ambulance Monday evening, and so did not get there until Tuesday, and waited at least 9 hours for a room. Two weeks is what his aide said, but I'm not sure if she's correct or if she's conflating my father's arm being in a sling a week earlier, which may well have been a sign of him needing to be in the hospital, but may also have been something that genuinely seemed to be responding to ibuprofen, as my father and brother thought.)

#27: I see that this has already been covered, but to reiterate, Alderac Entertainment Group is entirely different. I have reviewed many of their products over the years, and I have spoken with their people -- employees and authors both. The company's website is here.

Wow, the modern version of Van Loon's Lives. Cool.

If our guys are that crooked, nail them. I want better guys.

#24: ...I will seriously never understand why people think sniping and gratuitous personal attacks help their case when trying to debate something with another person. Sure, it feels good, but it's just brainless. It only makes the other guy hate you, and who's going to make an effort to get on the wavelength of someone they hate? :(

I've seen this on all sides of pretty much all topics. I've heard it classified as deciding to feel good, rather than to be effective. What it does, as far as I can tell, is rally those who already agree with one's position. It earns no points with anyone else.

Fr'ex, when I was teaching, one student decided to protest an essay grade. She came, with three of her friends, to find me, not in my office, during office hours, even though I'd told her when I'd be there, but rather to the room where I was helping the department with some task -- either recording grades or marking departmental exams, I forget which.

She was interested in grandstanding and informing me, in front of her friends, that I didn't know how to teach. And, her friends were mightily impressed and agreed with every word.

There was only one problem. None of them were the person who had the power to change her grade. None of them were the person she had to convince. That was me.

Net result: I was angry enough to raise my voice. The deputy chair, who wanted this dealt with quickly so he'd have an extra body for the work we were doing, was angry enough to raise his voice at the student as well. This was the first time I'd ever heard him raise his voice. The student and her friends marched away in righteous indignation. The grade remained unchanged.

This meant that the student got a D, which was worse than an F, because it meant that she couldn't even take the class again, to get it off her record. Fortunately for the student, this college allowed retroactive withdrawals. A semester later, she came to me with the appropriate form, which I signed.

The sad thing is that if the student had simply handed me the paper in question and not said anything, I would have looked at my comment, realized there was no way she could have figured out how to revise the paper from that, and bumped the grade up enough that her overall grade would have been a low C, which was what she seemed to be angling for, never mind that I had been telling students to visit me during office hours to talk about revising their papers and she had never done that. It was my first semester teaching, and I was all too aware of my shortcomings.

But, the student chose a tactic that involved rallying the troops, insulting the person she wanted to do something for her, and convincing the people whose opinions she valued that she was right. When she got that out of her system and decided to focus on being effective, she got -- well, probably not what she wanted, but at least something that meant she wasn't burned as badly as she might have been.

So, I'm 41, and the last time I checked my immunization records was before I was 30. How do I find out what immunizations I should be getting? I have some vague idea that even grown ups need periodic re-immunizations.

Zombies are scary because, given a sufficient number, we hear the whisper that it doesn't matter how clever we are. They will win.

I'm not into zombies. The better the story is, the less like I am to want direct contact with it.

#170: Was that an actual zombie story? Either way, it made me grin.

#192: You're confusing Lucy with Mina, a common mistake given that most screen and stage treatments flip the names for some undisclosed reason. But, I've no argument with your central premise.

I'm not sure where else to post this. I remember, weeks and weeks ago, people saying that they wanted Obama's first act as president to be closing Guantanamo.

It looks like this was indeed pretty darned close to his first act.

#17, the most complex version of "Simple Gifts" I'd ever heard: Yes, I'd noticed that as well.

Good luck, Patrick.

I've been called for jury duty twice, just ordinary jury duty. Well, technically 3 times, but once, I postponed because of vacation conflict and explained when I'd be available and was pinged then.

The first time, I waited most of 3 days and finished the Deptford trilogy.

The second time, I waited for 1 day and finished the sixth Harry Potter book. I talked to two lawyers considering folks for a particular case, explaining that my father was in the hospital, my mother had dementia, and, while I kind of welcomed the idea of jury duty as a distraction, I wasn't sure if I'd be needed by my folks, but I'd been told it was probably best not to try to get out of it.

They said, not unreasonably, that jury duty did not exist to take my mind off my problems, and that, while they couldn't exempt me, they could and would send me back to the general pool. In theory, I shouldn't have to serve again for another three or four years.

I live in Queens, in Woodside, NY, if that's helpful for demographics here.

Yay!

Yeah, I know. There's a long way to go still. But, still, yay!

I drank Iowa. Well, I drank the cup labeled Iowa at the election party Josh and I went to. The host made a brownie map of the USA, complete with state capitols marked. It has Alaska and Hawaii, but not the non-state bits. He had fifty cups of varying sizes filled with booze in proportion to the number of electoral votes the states had, and a complicated rotation system for who got to drink which cup. When a state was called, the person whose number it was got the cup. Fortunately, I got Iowa and Maryland, as I am on the small side myself.

#22, Most cultures seem to have some association with feet/shoes and uncleanliness, for obvious reasons: Okay, I'll bite. What are the "obvious reasons"?

#27 don delny: I was told it was because of the line of the clothing, or something like that. But, good pants with deep pockets don't mess up the clothing line. Clearly, women aren't supposed to be able to carry useful stuff in pockets.

I've taken to buying men's pants because women's pants have crap pockets, and I carry a lot in my pockets.

Unsurprisingly, I think Harold Feld is spot on his analysis here. (That is, he may or may not be spot on, but my biases are such that it is hardly surprising that I think he is.)

#226: snarky comments aside, the US president does seem to have powers modelled rather closely on those of a late 18th century British monarch, with added term limits. And the attitude of the general public to positions of power in your country never ceases to give me the creeps.

Totally. This is why I've been going on (and on) about how it's important to watch and to be as good about being critical about the new playing field as folks have been about the old.

At the June filking convention, Contata, Harold Feld led us in Leslie Fish's arrangement of Kipling's "The Old Issue", where eight years of rage and pain and fear and frustration just came pouring out. I do not wish to forget, ever, that the trigger for this performance was not something from the Republican side, but a disappointment in Obama.

I still voted for him, as I believe Harold did, and the reason I say "believe" is that I was not actually in the booth with him. But I do not wish to forget, and I want to make sure that, even as I cry with joy at Obama's acceptance speech, my brain has not been turned off.

#197, why can't we be happy to have the most benevolent, charming god-king if we must have a god-king:

Here's why.

I am still saying "President Barack Obama" to myself, in joy and wonder. "President". Not "King". And not -- never, ever, ever -- "God-King".

#73: Yes. It is just starting.

Don't get me wrong. I generally detest "The Star Spangled Banner" unless it's sung two syllables off, ending in "Play Ball", and I sang it tonight at an election party with tears running down my face.

But, as has been said here before, this can only be the start. Everything that's been done in the last eight years to show when we've been lied to, when someone is corrupt, wrong, misleading, or outright evil? Don't stop that, and don't fail to hold the Democrats to the same standards. Expose them all when they need exposing.

Slam them, and slam them hard if they try that rhetorical crap that many Republicans tried to use to brand them traitors. Slam them if they try to disenfranchise, ignore, and demonize those who dare to disagree with them.

On a silly side note: I'm a bit lightheaded, and I don't know if the Dems have a filibuster-proof majority. There's really only one thing I have against the idea of a Republican filibuster is that, as I understand it, one doesn't actually have to do the work of standing up there and talking. If that weren't the case, if one had to do a Mr. Smith Goes to Washington style filibuster, then it seems to me that if the opposition feels that strongly about something, one had better consider that there might, perhaps, be the merest possibility that one is wrong.

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