There’s nothing to make you realize what a charmed and easy life you’ve led like the various mail delivery systems.

At least, if you get as aggrieved (and insist on using aggrieved and only aggrieved, and possibly swan around your home wailing, “I’m so aggrieved!“) as I do by the UPS, USPS, and…generally I don’t think I’ve ever had a problem with FedEx, or if I have I’ve forgotten it in the way people forget the pain of delivering a baby.

It just doesn’t seem like it should be so difficult. We received a notice at our apartment the other day – and I think I’ve probably written about notices like this before, because it’s not the first – that stated a delivery attempt had been made and the package was at the post office. It helpfully listed our home address, but not, you know, the NAME of the person the package was for. At least this time it gave the tracking number! And that’s nothing compared to the email I got from Amazon today cheerfully telling me that a delivery attempt had been made, but no one was home, and the delivery person didn’t want to leave it unattended, so…

So?

So, joyous be! It’s ready for pickup!

Great! Pickup…where?

Wouldn’t you love to know!

Don’t even get me started on the “Look for a delivery notice on your door!” that was in the email. Yeah, I looked. On the door, in the mailbox. You know where I would love to be able to look? ONLINE, USING MY TRACKING NUMBER. Which, when entered, tells me “no such tracking number exists.”

I have recourse: my last Amazon package, when delivered, was intercepted (okay, received) by someone who had my cell phone number (but not vice versa) and who texted me to say they’d left it at the business downstairs from me. So…maybe my wayward package from today also ended up there.

If it didn’t, though, I’ll be VERY–okay, you get it.

<SO AGGRIEVED>

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Why do I keep getting calls from a doctor’s office in my neighborhood that I’ve never been to?

This is actually a fairly easy question to answer: equal parts 1) I’m reasonably certain that this particular doctor was the doctor randomly assigned as my primary care physician (by my insurance), though I changed it pretty immediately; 2) This office clearly REALLY wants patients.

Their approach is pretty off-putting and has gone through a few permutations since September. Why September? Maybe to precede open-enrollment period. The first message the secretary (I assume that’s who he was) left just asked me to call them back. No thanks! Two weeks later he called back to say, “the doctor would like to speak with you and see you.” I’m sure she would…but again, no thanks. I don’t mean to sound totally dismissive, but by this point I was also having to call people to question why I was suddenly enrolled in Medicaid, so I was already making more phone calls than I wanted to make regarding services I never requested.

I believe I grumpily deleted the voicemail I received in December, but it included the laughable tidbit, “The doctor needs to see you for a follow-up appointment.” Following up, I suppose, on the ghost of an initial appointment that they really would have liked me to have. In January he upped his tactics further by cautioning, “We received a letter from your insurance that we need to do a physical check on you.” And, actually, I find that fairly believable, because my insurance is just as likely to have lost my change-of-PCP or whatever. However, if I check my insurance’s website, it lists the provider I requested, NOT this doctor whose secretary is so relentless. And this week, the voicemail said, “We received a letter from your insurance and we have to do some tests on you,” and I’m really tired of it. But too stubborn to try to stop it by calling them and saying “Stop calling me; I have a PCP and it’s not Dr. ______.” Also, I want to see if he’ll escalate further and tell me that my test results don’t look good or something along those lines (I don’t actually wish that – it’s depressing that this series of calls seems to be an unethical way of increasing business – but I am curious).

So what kind of tests do you think I “need” to have done, per my insurance (“”)? I can almost guarantee that I’ve had more tests done over the past few years (come on, I had my immunity titers checked!) than most people in my demographic, although, given that this office has never had me as a patient or received any kind of information about me (except, apparently, my name from my insurance or perhaps through some sort of black market data sale), they wouldn’t know that.

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When I was twelve I had a water bottle purse. This is a difficult-to-describe contraption, but it was essentially a sling for a regulation size bottle of Evian or Dasani or what not, with a clear plastic strap to hang on your shoulder and three elastic circles to hold the bottle in place. Another twelve-year-old at my summer theatre camp had one, and I was exceedingly jealous. She not only had a lead role in the play but also looked like a real-life version of the American Girl doll Samantha, and for some reason the water bottle purse was the third part of the holy trinity of jealousy for me.

I was thinking about my water bottle purse (can it really be called a purse if it’s mostly made up of empty space? But then, aren’t *all* purses primarily made up of empty space and formed by the things that go inside of them? I suppose the difference is that a traditional purse in which you can carry more useful and necessary items like money and tissues, and it has enclosed sides. Are enclosed sides a distinguishing feature of a purse? What are the features that we would use to teach AI how to recognize purses?) for two reasons: One, because I was thinking about the books that people my age would likely have as common childhood memories, and unlike 90s classics like tamagotchis and slap bracelets, I don’t know that “water bottle purses” are a nostalgic memory I can easily find anyone else to, you know, nostalge with about. And now I need a purse to put all of those prepositions in.

The second reason I thought fondly about my transparent vinyl strap of a tote was that my boyfriend was telling me about how, in Taiwan, people carry their own contraptions to house cups of bubble tea. I just tried to google image search this, after quickly realizing that my secondhand description was going to utterly fail, and unfortunately, my image search also failed. My understanding is that the contraption cuts down on some small amount of the plastic involved in drinking bubble tea, but doesn’t include a reusable cup? It has the top, or the top and the straw, or something along those lines…but it sounded like it might look like this only with a plastic top attached…?

Clearly, more research is needed. I’m a fan of bubble tea more in theory than in practice, but I think I finally threw out my water-purse (believe me, I kept it for years, until the plastic was looking a little less than transparent) and I really could get behind another mobile cup holder.

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As a child, I was really into the Cotton commercial jingle. That’s not really what I set out to write about, but it is related. I’d imagine most people of a certain age (and I say that because…I really have no idea how long the Cotton jingle persisted as central to its branding; I seem to remember a Zooey Deschanel version, which suggests that it lasted pretty far out of my childhood, but…who knows) would recognize it, or be able to supply it based only on a prompt of “The touch/the feel/of ….”

I keep fumbling on the keyboard–let’s blame the polar vortex for stiff fingers–and typing “cotton jungle,” which is not a terrible image. I mean, I would walk through one, at the least. I imagine it referring to the clothing displays at department stores, those racks that kids always find their way into the center of, amidst the curtains of shirts. I assume that kids still do that because, duh, ready-made fort, but I also assume it’s a fairly universal cultural touchstone for people my age. It usually held a pretty low penalty, too, unlike running around on the furniture at Olan Mills while your parents pored over the photos of you they were paying for. Not that I know any ill-behaved former children who did that.

After my roommates stopped questioning why I had shipped 200 pounds of middle-grade fiction to our apartment (I’d like to add a middle step here of them admiring my speed and impressive arranging abilities in getting them all shelved, but alas), they started looking at the spines of the books in the living room and exclaiming, “Hey! My Teacher is an Alien–I remember that! I read that whole series…Oh man, Jeremy Thatcher Dragon Hatcher?” (they were in the Coville section). “When we were kids and we had no internet, I kind of thought I was the only one reading these…”

While it’s not true that you can find any book/video/cassette/tv show from your childhood on Amazon or eBay (I had to deflect the argument “but you can find anything…” a number of times when justifying my book shipment), it is true that it’s much easier. I wrote years ago about the eidetic memory of YouTube, where I was able to find all of the cartoons I watched as a child, and I brought this up to my roommates when we were talking books. They remembered Eureka’s Castle and Noozles and Little Koala but not Mysterious Cities of Gold, which I remember being called “Children of the Sun,” but I may have just been influenced by the theme song. I’ve watched snippets or episodes of all of these in the past decade, because they’ve been preserved indefinitely online. However, I only found out today that Mysterious Cities of Gold was based on a novel by Scott O’Dell–a novel that I’ve never heard of, called The King’s Fifth, which seems odd since I have Island of the Blue Dolphins, The Black Pearl, and Zia on the same bookshelf as my Bruce Coville books.

The Scott O’Dell IMDB page (which, weirdly, includes entries for the novels he wrote that DIDN’T get adapted for film or TV, like it’s a card catalog or something (ETA: I was incorrect; the two books that were listed were in fact adapted for TV–it’s just that Scott O’Dell’s entries specified “novel”) also informed me that there’s a second season of Mysterious Cities of Gold that was never released during the 1980s in America…and that it was released in 2012, 2013, and 2016. So…I clearly have more research to do.

I’m still waiting, though, for someone else whose favorite book growing up was The Mozart Season by Virginia Euwer Wolff. I know you’re out there somewhere…

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Two kids on the train who must have been 12 or 13, both engrossed in their cell phones.

Girl: Look at this! My aunt follows my instagram.

Boy: How old is your aunt?

Girl: Like, in her twenties

Boy: Okay, that’s reasonable. (Shakes his plastic Starbucks cup, which is full of ice.) Man, I need more ice drugs!

Two women in their fifties. One is consoling the other about a relative–mother, maybe?

Woman 1: Well, of course no one wants to upset her–

Woman 2: I DON’T MIND UPSETTING HER

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Since I had just begun Deborah Eisenberg’s Your Duck is My Duck when I included it in Part 3, I need to start by saying that the title story was one of my favorites and it contains the most genius description of a puppet show I’ve ever read. 

I read about 1/3 fewer books this year than I have in probably the past 10 years. Is it the internet? Planning on more reading in 2019, but here are the last 5 of 2018 (though I haven’t finished The House of the Seven Gables yet, because I left it at my friend’s aunt’s house over the holidays).

The Personality Brokers, by Merve Emre: I was never a huge proponent of Myers-Briggs, but I will say I thought it was more on the boundary of psychology and pseudo-science than it was straight up Jungian astrology. I also find it curious how putting your “Type” in an online dating profile has morphed into a bright red flag (no, I didn’t have ENFJ or INFJ listed on mine, but I didn’t really get it when my roommates would dismiss anyone who listed theres. Now I get it! It’s like listing your favorite book as The Fountainhead!). And now I know the history of the Myers-Briggs (formerly the Briggs-Myers, but…acronym trouble abounded)

Educated, by Tara Westover: Many memoirs written by authors who have great stories can be lacking in the writing itself (in another blog book list, several years ago, exists my reaction to A Child Called It, which I believe was “WTF did I just read??”) This is absolutely not one of them. The writing is excellent. I appreciated the way the author dealt with chronology as well–not utterly strict but episodic while adhering more to the importance of theme than to calendar year.

The Bodies in Person, by Nick McDonell: I found myself getting annoyed by the fiction-borrowed tics that the author employs. I’m not saying that a work of nonfiction needs to be straightforward, or that it can’t be lyrical. But when it’s as journalistic as this is, there are certain flourishes and trailings off and sentences without actual verbs that seem out of place. The premise of this is obviously sobering and I don’t blame the author for not being able to concretely answer large moral questions. I did admire the writing at times, but there was something that felt off about it to me. 

Contents May Have Shifted, by Pam Houston: I had started this, somewhat ironically, before getting on an airplane (which the title pertains to), but didn’t take it on the plane with me because I only walked with my Kindle that trip (on which I read Houston’s short story collection Cowboys are my Weakness). I enjoy the general conceit of the book’s structure–bouncing around from flight to flight, trip to trip–and Houston’s voice. At the time I started the book there was a possibility I would be moving to California, specifically where Houston lives half of the year, so maybe I was also looking for landmarks and/or gossip. No gossip, though I did find myself snooping on Facebook afterward to determine the identities of a few characters.

The House of the Seven Gables, by Nathaniel Hawthorne: I was going to read this with a student before she visited Massachusetts, but we didn’t have enough lead time. I had already checked it out from the library, though, and having recently revisited (and appreciated vastly more than I did in high school) The Scarlet Letter with a different student (and, I admit, based on its smallness and lightness making it appropriate for a subway read) decided to read it anyway. Hawthorne is much more playful than I remembered (I did not remember him as remotely playful).

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I could never sit cross-legged as a child (I don’t think – okay, I know – they called it ‘criss cross applesauce’ back then, but maybe younger millennials will remember it that way). My hips just don’t want to rotate externally (quoth my pediatrician, about my feet and legs, “Good for a runner, bad for a dancer,” a pronouncement in direct opposition to my natural talents and proclivities (running is terrible and makes my tongue hurt)). Even now, after years of yoga, although I can sit in sukhasana, I still laugh every time that it translates to “easy cross-legged seat.” Please put me in supta virasana or something, truly (not really, but normal virasana with no blocks or props or anything is leagues more comfortable than sukhasana. 

Sometimes this inability led to me being…not in trouble, exactly, but semi-scolded. But why? Usually this happened not when I was sitting with my legs out in front of me on the trampoline at gymnastics (when it would have made sense to tell me to sit differently so no one tripped over them/landed on me), but when I was sitting with both tucked under me, folded into a smaller package than ‘applesauce’ and vastly more comfortable as well. In that case, it’s not a safety issue, so it starts to veer into a “small children must comply” and “there is one way of doing things” – granted, it was probably reflexive on the part of my instructor to some degree. But there’s  no reason for kids to have to sit identically if they’re not in the way (and that’s a loaded statement, I know).

I feel the same way about pen/pencil grip. It wasn’t so long ago that left-handed kids were forced to write with their right hands, and it’s not a big jump from that to “You must hold your pencil at this angle between finger x and finger y or it’s NOT CORRECT.” I’m pretty sure the “rules” about how to hold a writing utensil aren’t based on anatomy or orthopedics (but then, I do hold my pencil ‘incorrectly’ and I do have tendinitis…it must be due to my bad form and not to the years of tennis, harp, piano, and typing, surely!) I will add that the first grade teacher who tried to correct my pencil grip was herself “adjusted” by some higher up and instructed to form her letter y’s differently. But I still write them the way she did, with a scoop instead of a v forming the top! 

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I don’t know how many times I’ve written about healthcare, and let me disclaim: I’m sure the intricacies of American healthcare that I’ve experienced are nothing, in the greater scheme of things. Oh, I’ve been incorrectly charged or double charged and I’ve had terrible experiences with the doctor’s office down the street…and prescriptions…but in general, nothing that took up as much time or money as the people in stories I’ve heard had to spend.

However, I would love to know HOW I ended up automatically enrolled in Medicaid.

I got a notification from the NY Health Exchange in November: “Congratulations! You qualify for Medicaid. You have been automatically enrolled and do not need to take any action.” Okay…I haven’t been on the exchange since I chose a health insurance plan last year, at which time I input my tax return, which shows that I definitely don’t qualify for Medicaid.

So I call the exchange and tell them about the issue, to which they say, well, it looks like you’re still enrolled in a qualified plan, so just ignore the Medicaid notice and reenroll in your insurance plan for 2019. I don’t love where this is going. Can I register somehow that I’m not TRYING to use Medicaid? No, I’m told. It will straighten itself out once I get a new plan, maybe.

I think that because of this glitch – which seems like it may not be super uncommon, though usually it’s a matter of someone almost-but-not-quite meeting the income requirements for Medicaid–which is much worse, because those are people who would qualify for a subsidy against a qualified plan, which they then can’t get because they supposedly have Medicaid (whereas it’s no problem for me to buy a plan at full price) – because of this glitch, I had to act as if I was purchasing my health insurance plan for the first time – ie as if I were choosing a new plan – rather than just being automatically reenrolled, but okay. It seems to work.

Then I got a Medicaid card in the mail last week. I don’t know why I find this so viscerally upsetting, but I think it’s a combination of 1) can I please document somehow that I’m not trying to scam the health insurance system, and 2) I’m sure this is happening to someone in the opposite direction (not, obviously, as a result of me mistakenly being enrolled, but the system doesn’t seem super…robust) and it’s a much more significant problem. 

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I often think to myself, “What would I do if I had no items on my to do list?” And to be clear, I have two of those lists at most times. The weekly one goes on a folded sheet of notebook paper and the daily one goes on a napkin. Not just any napkin–the ones from the pizza place are too hard to write on, but the coffee and bagel store has the perfect napkins for my needs. 

(let me just put this here: no, these are not real problems. This is musing. A bull session.)

As a small, existentially distressed child I reacted with horror when my mom told me, apropos of the remodel they were doing on our house, that after they finished that, they would redecorate the living room, and then maybe my room, and then…it would probably be time to start the cycle again. The idea of never being FINISHED struck something in me. When do you get to rest and enjoy the changes? Now, as a somewhat less small existentially challenged (I’ve made strides; existential threat level is “guarded” most of the time here) adult, I find the opposite problem troubling: the ‘problem’ of having nothing left that needs doing. 

It *seems* like if I took the several pounds of loose change that currently sit in a plastic bag next to my door to the bank and turned them into more easily usable money, if I took photographs of the mementos (playbills, ticket stubs, printed photos, wedding programs) I’ve saved in manilla folders for 2006-2018 and could thus discard the physical items, if I recycled all of the electronics that are in a plastic bin in my (nonworking, but black-dirt-ejecting) fireplace…that I would feel somehow at peace. But I’ve had the experience of an empty to do list (weekly edition), and I know that the way I actually feel when that happens is PANICKED.

Even in theory, that shouldn’t be the case. If I manage to finish the stack of books and magazines next to my bed, dust all of my surfaces, take the stack of old sheets and t-shirts to a textile recycling place…I could always read a single, solitary book, start a new project, or practice harp. There would be no shortage of things to do, simply an absence of a backlog. But I’ve had the experience of finding myself, midweek, with every item crossed off and a lack of “have to”…and have been slightly anxious because of it. 

It’s definitely possible that if I hadn’t had the to do list in the first place, I wouldn’t feel anxiety over it’s “finished” status. I feel like there’s some similarity here between (I’m thinking of an Amy Clampitt poem here) losing a roll of film and all of the vacation memories it contained, but still having the memories of all of the things you didn’t photograph…it’s an imprecise metaphor, or one I’ve yet to untangle, but it feels accurate in some way. 

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I’ve spent a fair amount of time in post offices and they’re all generally frustrating, but they’ve all attained different levels of this quality. Long lines: probably. Grumpy people (customers and/or post officers): most likely. Kafka-esque conversations: Yes please! My Brooklyn post office is…pretty terrible. I go in expecting that there will be long lines and that if I have a question it’s 50-50 whether the teller will know the answer (which is not a critique of the teller/post officer…it is, however, a structural critique, because the post office is like many fine institutions in that it’s designed to make accountability a shifty quality that bounces back and forth among different segments of the company and eventually falls to the ground, dead). I’m just happy that you can buy stamps from a machine instead of waiting in line.

In any case, I try to avoid the post office unless I miss a delivery (tiny mailbox=this happens often, although occasionally I’ve had an almost-fitting package stuffed into my mailbox and then been unable to get it out, because it would only fit out the top of the mailbox, the way it came in…like the mailbox needed to regurgitate instead of—ANYWAY, I digress, and it doesn’t egress). The “missed package” window is pretty straightforward and usually has a much shorter line than the general one. That is, unless it’s either closed (as it was the other day, and they did have a flat-rate envelope sort of propped up in the window, but it’s a post office, so it wasn’t exactly out of place and might have been more obvious if it had “Closed” written on it…) or you ring the bell intermittently for ten minutes before someone appears.

Today, there were only two people ahead of me, but the woman being served seemed to be inquiring about a missing package that she had sent, rather than one she was picking up…and the post officer was telling her she had no way of knowing where the package was but that it said it had been delivered, the woman countered that nothing had been delivered and no notice or anything, etc etc – very standard post office conversation. Then the customer gets frustrated that the officer is washing her hands of the issue.

Customer: I am a CUSTOMER. You need to stop making excuses and saying that it’s the other person’s problem.

Officer: Ma’am, I can’t tell you where the package is. You have to ask the post office in the area where it was delivered.

Customer: You should have some way of looking that up! How is it that you don’t have an internal system that can tell you these things? 

Man in front of me interrupts: What’s the zip code?

Customer: It’s in Queens! It’s (reads zip code)

Man: Every zip code has its own post office, so–

Customer: I know, but they should have a way of looking them up–

Man: I have Google. (starts to look for the delivery area post office)

Customer: THIS IS WHY THE US POST OFFICE IS DYING.

Man: Oh, there isn’t any service here.

Customer: (leaves in a huff)

Man: I got it! Oh, she left.

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