Not a bedtime story?

You may think you can read babies anything before bed, that they don't understand anything more complicated than I Am A Bunny anyway, so what's the difference? Well, I don't know if the uneasy sleep last night was because of nightmares, but I think I'll refrain in the future from reading The Fall of the House of Usher as a bedtime story.

Rich Man's Kugelis

Saturday this damn stove top unflamed itself and the thing went off and i turned it back on but didn't know how long it was on and the rice burned so bad it ruined everthing, i couldn't eat even it it, it was disgusting.

Sunday I made rich man's kugelis: lasagna. Holy shit it was amazing. When she was like Wow this is good I was like WTF are you talking about, just good?! p.s. you can use lithuanian style cottage cheese instead of ricotta, it costs five times less.

First Article: "The Moral Hazard Myth"

In this here post entiteled The Other Side of the Idiot, Sarunas recommended a couple articles about why health care should be universal. Here's my responses to the first one:

1. Dental care isn’t free in Lithuania (thank God: I’d never go to a free dentist). My special lady and I went to the dentist this summer instead of on vacation, the cost being about 750 litai, including two check ups, two cavities, and post-partum periodontal disease. At that price, we went to the best dentist in Vilnius and feel much better now. Was it worth the price, worth scrapping our vacation plans? No doubt.

2. Two idiotic examples. Obviously, nobody who can be golfing wastes time at the hospital. I said people go because they’re bored, not that they go unnecessarily when they have better things to do. Also they go over and over again to various doctors trying to get an excused absence from work; then the government health insurance is supposed to pay them 80% if their wages for their sick leave after the first few days. And Steve? What a fuckin moron. That 750 litai I mentioned made me think twice, but anybody worth the air he breathes will do whatever it takes to pay for critical medical care.

3. “Do you think that people whose genes predispose them to depression or cancer, or whose poverty complicates asthma or diabetes, or who get hit by a drunk driver, or who have to keep their mouths closed because their teeth are rotting ought to bear a greater share of the costs of their health care than those of us who are lucky enough to escape such misfortunes?” Of course I do, because the alternative is slavery. Forcing healthy people to pay the bills of sick people is slavery. Penalizing people who avoid those problems by making them pay for people who didn’t is not only ludicrous, it’s perverse. As sad as it may be that your genes are crappy, forcing other to pay for it is not just sad, it's simply wrong.

Top Five Moments at the Urologist

1. Woman walks into the wrong waiting area full of 50-75 year old men (and me), sees the sign that says Urologist, and runs back out wide eyed and open mouthed.

2. Sitting there talking to the doctorbefore the exam, thinking, "I could just get up and leave. What's he gonna do?"

3. Hearing the guy before me through the door going "Oh! Oh! Oooooh!" (he had something acorn sized in a jar when he came out: if I find out it came out of his penis I'll kill myself)

4. Cracking up laughing while the doctor explained the digital exam, and again during the exam.

5. After he...was done...the doctor says, "My wife's a dentist. I always tell her her job's worse than mine, since she has such bad odors coming out of her patiest mouths..."

The only thing useful for you to know...

...about my business trip to Finland last week is this: you can have up to three mistakes on your plane ticket and it's still valid. Colleagues who didn't know me yet bought me my ticket, since their college financed the trip, and somehow I got a ticket for "Arnas." I thought I wasn't going anywhere, once I saw that, but it turned out to be no problem.

The bizarre thing is that this isn't the first time I've been mistaken for an Arnas. It's bizarre because I've met dozens of Arases and Arunases in my life, but never an Arnas. The first time somebody called me that, I was like, "wow, that's some speech impediment you got there," and she was like, "oh, oops, I thought that was your name, sorry; it's a real name, much more common." Well, I've yet to meet one.

UPDATE: Back to work for just an hour before somebody came in and called me Arnas...wft?!

The other side of the idiot coin.

Recently we had a chat about how health care professions in free health care systems are low quality. Now I'd like to present a summary of my morning which will shed some light on the other half of the problem.

I got to the polyclinic, registered to get my health history sheets, which I have to get every time to go get in line for the doctor. No appointments more specific than for a certain day, you just go into a hallway full of people waiting for the same doctor and ask who's last in line. There's only two people in front of me, thank God. Or so I thought. No, these two people literally took two hours. And they weren't doing anything impressive in there either, cause this is just a family practice doctor: all she's got is a stethoscope and tongue depressors. You can't even pee in a cup for her without going up to the 7th floor.

So you know what these two patients before me we doing? Evidence #1. Chatting. Somebody else in line got so pissed she yanked the door open to see what they were doing, and announced to everybody that they're both reclined in their chairs laughing about something.

Evidence #2. Each time I've been in line to get my sheets, there's somebody complaining about how he's been all over the place talking to lots of people and they keep telling him to go someplace else.

Evidence #3. The nurse came out at one point and called somebody's last name, and I asked, "Excuse me, I'm next, can't I come in yet?" She said, "What are you, sick or something?" "YES I'm sick, I'm cronically sick, that's why I'm here! My lungs are shot from coughing!" She says, "Well, why didn't you say something?!"

Why didn't I say something? I'll tell you why: I thought everybody in line is sick or something, that's why they're here, so why should I bitch? Then these three pieces of evidence clicked into place: these people are mostely idiots who don't need to be here. They're here cause it's free. They're here cause they're bored and they wanna chat, or they're stupid and are waiting in the wrong place (but they won't accept that fact without talking to the doctor for a while), or hypocondriacs that go to the doctor everyday. All three of these catagories of people would be eliminated from cluttering the system up if going to the doctor cost $100/hour. My ten minute visit would have been $15 and change, which I would have gladly paid to not have to wait through the two idiots in front of me, since they certainly wouldn't have paid such prices to shoot the shit.

When I left there were 9 people in line behind me. There's no way they all got through before lunch, meaning some even got to sit there for an hour waiting for the doctor to eat. The doctor doesn't make time for anybody, though, because in her line of work, time does not equal money.

p.s. I had to pee in a cup before registering to see a urologist next week. First, the toilet doesn't even have a flusher, and the water's turned off, so you can't wash your hands in the sink that's missing a handle, and forget about soap. Second, I can't register for next week yet, since they don't start making the week's schedule until the week begins. This counts as a good polyclinic in free health care system.

I wonder if this happens to everybody...

I take off my bookself Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad. I go sit down to read it. I don't know that much about it except that it's well known and sounds interesting. Also it's one of the books my folks shipped to me from the states, so I figure it's probably a good one. I open it up to find that in fact it's not the novel at all: it's Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness: A Casebook. "This casebook contains materials relevant to a deeper understanding of the origins and reception of this controversial text," which I haven't even read yet!

Are you searching for information about royal kings, or Kings, the drinking game, aka Circle of Death?

Either way, this blog isn't probably the best resource for this search...

Lithuanian are Gentlemen II

Eina žmogelis gatve.
Priėjo bomželis ir prašo 20 ct. Tas žmogelis ir sako:
-Žinai, aš tau duosiu 10 eurų... Bet tu nueisi ir nusipirksi alaus...
-Ką jūs, pone, jau seniai negėriau alaus.
-Tai nusipirksi moterį.
-Ką jūs, jau seniai nesimylėjau...
-Tai nusipirk bilietą į krepšinį/futbolą.
-Ne...jau nebežinau kaip jis žaidžiamas...
-Žinai ką, einam pas mane. Mano žmona paruoš vakarienę: lašiša,
baltas vynas ir t.t.
-Oi ne, pone, aš toks nešvarus...
-Ne, ne, aš noriu žmonai parodyti, kaip atrodo vyras, kuris negeria
alaus, neperka moterų ir neina į sporto varžybas…

You Get What You Pay For

Saturday night my eye swelled up so much I thought it was gonna fall out. It wasn't better in the morning, so we went to the medic. There's a little building next to my polyclinic that's open nights and weekends when the polyclinic is closed. These nurses looked at my eye and recommended something, and laughed at my special lady for not knowing that "it's an antibiotic, it's been around for a while now!" We went to the pharmacy across the street with the prescription and they told us "you're not going to able to find this anywhere, it's been off the market for a while now. You might be able to get it made in the pharmacy lab upstairs." No thanks. So we asked for an alternative, and we got one. Also, the nurses had told me to squirt camomile tea into the eye through a turkey baster. The pharmacist told me not to do that, that would irritate the eye, just use a cold compress. Turns out that's what everybody I talked to afterwards does. The drops the pharmacist gave us worked great, it was almost all better in 12 hours, but I stopped using it anyway after my special lady read me the side effect, including glaucoma and nerve damage.

The moral of the story is, you get what you pay for directly. Does your universal health care suck? Mine does. I supposedly pay for it through my taxes. That is, I pay for it if I need it, and if I don't, I pay for somebody elses. But when you go to doctors who don't have any financial incentive to stay up to date even with what drugs are on the market, don't be disappointed with shitty results, cause that's what you'll get half the time. The other half if good, but is half your medical care being good enough? Every person I've talked to has complained about the system here, and many have had to complain formally.

How about letting me keep my taxes and choose my doctor with money instead of being assigned one by my address? Maybe then the fucking morons would be out of a job soon enough and not writing people expired perscriptions. The one redeeming quality of the system here is that the unemployed aren't eligible for free healthcare; at least I'm not paying for total freeloaders.

Let's Do Lunch

A rushed lunch today in the caf before class, just soup. Chatted with my colleague about nothing in particular. Then in a rush to finish my soup, I poured some of her bottled water into it so I could guzzle it down. Little did I know the water was carbonated and lemon flavored, that mixed real well with my creamed cabbage soup, forcing me to vomit violently. All over the place. Just kidding, but it was gross.

WWWW, Cause Now it's Wider

Sean: "I started a blog in honor of my new commitment to not have any idea who is trying to be in contact with me."