Positivity in the Bizarro World

Back in the distant past that was 2008, I started having a few health problems.  Nothing major, but noticeable enough that I realized that my zero years of medical training probably weren’t going to help me out this time.  After a brief visit with my general physician, she advised me to head over to the Building with All the Machinery in It so that I could have an ultrasound conducted.  I was also told that I needed to drink roughly ten gallons of water [citation needed] an hour beforehand, making the trip to the Building the longest drive of my life- and I’ve been stuck in L.A. rush hour traffic before.  The 405 has nothing on dodging stop lights and soccer moms in suburbia while carrying a full bladder.

As I arrive at the Building, I park my car a little too eagerly (read: completely jacked up and in multiple spots) and hop out so that I can get the deed over with.  As I’m closing the door, I hear a woman speaking, so I turn to find the source of the voice.  There is a woman sitting in the driver’s seat of a brown sedan parked three spots down.  I see she’s looking directly at me, so it’s safe to assume that she’s addressing me (possibly about my shitty parking).  Because I was currently living in the suburbs and my “you probably shouldn’t approach a strange person’s car” meter was in the shop that day, I walked towards her car.  She then repeated what she apparently had said earlier: it’s going to be ok.  I spoke to Him and he said that whatever’s wrong with you, it’s going to be ok.

Now, I’m a very spiritual person, but I’m also a realist.  If a person tells me that they have specific information about the Other World, but that I would need to part with all of my worldly possessions to access this information, I would tell them where they can cram their information and then take my worldly possessions out for ice cream just so they know that I’d never give them away.  But I also believe in the power of positivity.  The right positive energy dispersed at the right time can have the most amazing effects and I’ve never been bamboozled by people spouting positive, feel-goodery before.  So I walked away from Brown Sedan Lady feeling like this was going to be the most awesome medical-related visit of my life.  Who knows, maybe the Ultrasound operator would find gold bars in my insidey parts and refrain from asking questions.  So into the building I walked, with a new sheen of confidence and an urge to pee unlike any other I’d ever felt before in my life.

Long story short, I don’t know how much my enemies paid Brown Sedan Lady to come and give me false hope, but I bet they feel like it was money well spent.  Not only was everything not “ok”, but everything turned out to be one clusterfuck after another that would see me visiting a gaggle of doctors, specialists and even the E.R. in the span of a year.  It was like I was living in Bizarro World, where positive thinking and positive words only made things worse.  I ran out of health insurance (and, let’s be honest, energy) before my doctors could positively ID just what in the hell was actually wrong with me, but I’ve been assured by them that “it’s not really life-threatening, just inconvenient.” 

You’re telling me.

For the most part, I’ve been managing without the luxury of doctor visits for the better part of five years now (although sometimes I do wish those sweet latexed hands would comfort me in my worst moments).  If I’m the victim of some sort of “Stephen King’s Thinner” hoax, I cannot stress enough how I want to apologize or make amends for whatever or whoever I crossed.  In my mind, I’m starting to think that I need someone to approach me in public and give me a good, “hey, fuck you!” just to reverse the Bizarro spell.  But that’ll probably just make me cry.  So please, don’t do that. 

A Brief History of My History with Snow Days

My history with snow days.

I am a product of private school.  And as such, I became used to the idea of school closing down for whatever reason the administrators deemed necessary.  Too much rain?  School’s closed.  Fifty degrees below zero?  School’s closed.  One of the million varieties of religious holidays?  School’s closed.  (Just kidding.  I went to Catholic school.  We only acknowledged our holidays, of which there was one approximately every three days.) 

So when my mother decided that we had run out of money and I had to attend a public high school, I was given a very unfortunate reminder that the CPS apparently shares the same creed as the Postal Service: “neither snow nor rain nor gloom of night…”

As a kid, I would sit in front of the tv, anxiously awaiting the moment that my school would scroll across the bottom of the screen as part of the school closures.  Being a Catholic school with a name towards the end of the alphabet, the anticipation was always almost too much to bear.  But alas, the school’s name would scroll past and I would kick off my uniform, climb back into bed and watch eight hours of Springer, Sally Jesse Raphael, Donahue, Jenny Jones, Ricky Lake, and our other forgotten national 90s talk show host treasures.

I never gave it much thought that Chicago Public Schools were suspiciously missing from the scrolly list because, well, I saw my school’s name and to hell with everyone else.

But, oh, you don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone.

In my four years of public high school education, I don’t think I’ve ever had a foul-weather cancellation (but, oddly, Pulaski Day was always a school holiday…and I had to learn about Pulaski on my own, as he wasn’t even taught in school.  “Here kids, take the day off to commemorate a Polish hero that none of are even remotely aware of, aside from the fact that he’s a prominent street name in Chicago.”).  By my senior year, I started having to make my own snow days. 

Don’t get me wrong: I understand why some schools might want to remain open.  A lot of children will probably rely on the schools as warming and feeding centers.  But I lived a good twenty minutes from school (oh, the joys of attending a non-neighborhood Magnet school).  So if nothing was plowed or shoveled, a lot of my classmates and I were sludging through hell just to get to a building where we were going to behave like jackasses and pay attention to absolutely no one.

(Just kidding!  We were absolute angels!  Like, cray cray adorbz.)

Of course, my childlike mind saw any accumulation or drop of temperature as a potential Roland Emmerich movie and couldn’t understand why two inches of snow couldn’t be the standard closure measurement, like in Marks, Mississippi (according to family member accounts).  Looking back on it, perhaps I was being bratty.  Perhaps I was spoiled by my private school days.  Maybe CPS was just looking out for our best interest (which is evident by the amazing number of school closures in the past few years).  But, in the end, we’re Chicagoans.  We laugh in the face of “lake effect snow.”  A negative temperature reading won’t stop us from going to a Bears game.  But I didn’t appreciate this until I became an adult and realized my bosses didn’t give two flying fucks about a “snow day.” 

Wait…this sounds suspiciously like high school…