Blog of Magic Cheese

It's been 3 weeks.

I understand that with a new insurance card, these things can be complicated. That's why I was understanding when you couldn't fill my prescription when I showed up, or even when I showed up 5 days later expecting it to have been filled.

It has now been 3 weeks and when I ask about my prescription I get a blank look and vague mumbling while you look it up in the computer. Three. goddamn. weeks. Three weeks and my third trip to visit your unsmiling faces and you have no idea that I had a prescription in the file still waiting to be filled.

You make sixty times as much money as I do. I understand that it's probably poor compensation for putting up with idiot customers who can't remember what medications they're on, who yell at you because they don't understand what a deductible is, and who think it's your fault when their insurance doesn't authorize a medicine.

But I've taken this medicine since 2003, it's covered, I gave you the doctor's scribbly note in mid-December, and it's been three weeks.

These little blue and white pills are the only thing keeping me from being a twitchy incomprehensible savant with rapid eye movement because my brain goes too fast for my own good. They are what is enabling me to hold a job, and you, YOU are the sentinels at the big iron pharmaceutical locked door that permit my drugs through? You're the guardians of the gate, the keepers of the keys, the appointed elite? I could scream.

The only reason I'm not locked up in a room at home either comatose or trying to learn three new computer languages at once is because I keep an emergency supply for situations like this, because between your diarrheac idiocy and insurance companies' bureaucratic bullshit, it's happened plenty of times before.

Wait for another 10 minutes? I've already been here for 20. I'm risking being late for work. Sure I'll wait, but oh look, after 15 minutes have gone by, there's still no sign of my pills showing up or you doing anything about filling them, like you haven't done for the last 3 weeks.

I swear to god, I could fucking kill someone. I don't know if it would be you, or the woman in front of me with a shopping cart full of water, microwave popcorn, and 2 liter bottles of soda that she's paying for over a goddamn pharmacy counter, but I want to grab one of you by the hair, drag you shrieking down the aisle, your clothes making squeaking noises on the linoleum, and take you outside where I will shatter your ribs, kick your internal organs into a pulp, and then curb stomp your head until your skull breaks and I smash your brain like an overripe melon. Then I will leave the body, either wearing its blue vest or in a puddle of high fructose corn syrup toxin, as a warning to anybody that stands between me and my medicine.

I am so angry that my rage on the walk back has me cooking inside my jacket. I can see steam rising from my collar. I fucking hate the pharmacy. And I still don't have my prescription.

In my family, we don't really talk about our emotions or express affection or that sort of thing. The word "love" is certainly rarely said, and never in association with a family member. Think 1st generation Japanese American "soldier on" mentality complete with gruff grunting.

Where we do show our affections is by giving one another snacks. I remember my grandmother always having snacks she'd picked out at Oto's, my hometown Japanese grocery, waiting for me and my brother when we went to visit her. She'd buy boxes of Pocky for the neighborhood kids, too.

I was raised primarily by my father, and he took this, as is his way, to his own peculiar extreme by bringing boxes of dozens of cream filled donuts and apple strudel in the house for me and my brother when we were teenagers. As a child he'd take me, a chronic insomniac like him, to the gas station to get donuts at 3 A.M. when I couldn't sleep.

Somehow I've picked this up too, because whenever I'm on trips I'm always looking for new sour candies for my brother, or interesting cane sugar sodas for my husband that he'd like to drink.

I went to pick up my car in Sacramento, where I'd had to leave it before Christmas because the flights were so hectic getting into Canada to visit my in-laws that we had to fly out of Sacramento and back into San Francisco. I skipped wushu practice to hang out with my father on Sunday and I think he must understand how much I hate missing wushu practice because he took me to every snack place we went to as a child and I came home loaded up with Japanese and Chinese groceries and two tubs of ice cream from Vic's.

I love you too, Dad.

We're having one of the warmest Januaries on record in Northern California.

Intellectually, I understand how bad this is. We're in a drought, no rain means dire straits for farmers, and increased risk for wildfires.

It is so hard to step out into the sun and not be happy, though. A mere month ago I finally admitted to myself, after three years of living in San Francisco, that I was never going to wear my beloved tank tops from my school years in Orange County again, that I needed to stop buying tank tops, and that I needed to face up and remove them from my wardrobe.

Today I pulled the box of tank tops out of the corner of my closet and wore one. The dryer in my ghetto complex is broken, but I don't care because it's warm and sunny and beautiful and I can hang our laundry on the balcony. (We're actually not supposed to, but they can bite my ass and fix the damn dryer first.) I keep stepping outside to feel the sun and the warm breeze kiss my upper arms, and I'll keep hoping for rain to relieve the thirsty state, but if I can have this weather just one more day, I would really like to wear shorts for the first time in three years.

Today I saw the only other person I've ever seen who also plugs his ears on the BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) train. The noise on the train can get incredibly painful. I don't understand how people can just sit there and listen to the howling and screeching of the rails.

Unfortunately my newfound brother in the fight against hearing loss spent the rest of the train ride having a conversation with somebody who was not there.

The evidence is piling up.

I'm in Southern California for the week, visiting my mother and getting ready for the wedding of two of my best (and at this point, oldest- in September I'll have known the groom for a decade. Where did the years go?) friends.

Having been out of school a number of years and on my own for a while, every time I go back to one of my parents' places and pick through my old things in my former rooms, looking for anything that would be handy to take home, I always feel like I am looting. I guess it's like when you visit a parent, sleep in your old room, and feel like you're sleeping in somebody else's room. Somebody else with an unhealthy obsession with the X-Men.

U2's new single is out- you can listen to it on their site. Bono's voice sounds like it's in a great place this album. I think for a while he was smokin' it up, trying to make his voice gravelly and low, which sort of worked. With the Irish accent, his singing was kind of like being covered in warm gravel and cream. I really like it when his voice is clear though, and the new single at least features a very youthful-sounding set of vocals.

I'm also wondering if the U2 marketing machine has gotten too slick for its own good. I'm a huge U2 fan- I listened to them a lot when I was an undiagnosed adult ADHD headcase rattling around UC Irvine. (Zooropa, incidentally, is a great album if you want to get a feeling of the chaos and confusion that having sky-high brain waves can give you.) But I'm sort of pausing at the multiple CD packages that are offered. $66 for an album, booklet, book, and poster? Very cool stuff no doubt, but steep for somebody who's been working part time since October and whose laptop may well be cooking itself in its own kool-aid, necessitating the use of several hundred dollars for a new one.

Looking forward to the wedding, to the new experience of wearing the traditional Vietnamese costume the ao dai, and seeing old friends. And then, as awesome as seeing my mother and my old friends is, heading back to San Francisco, because I miss the MUNI, I miss my wushu schools, and I miss not getting flipped off by old ladies in expensive cars with handicapped plates because I stopped at a red instead of running it to make a right turn. Seriously. wtf?