A losing game

As a friend of mine said on Facebook today, "Today I learned that the internet is only for insensitive assholes. That's nice." While that's a bit of an overstatement, I have to say that I agree with the sentiment.

As we all know, Amy Winehouse met an untimely end at the age of 27 this afternoon. I was at the gym when I found out - actually I was in the locker room sweating from every pore in my body. While I had been on the treadmill, my Twitterfeed exploded with news of her death. There were tweets galore, many expressed sadness combined with a lack of surprise - understandable considering her very public struggles with substance abuse. But it didn't take long for the jokes about rehab to start and the judgmental "why should I feel sympathy for her" tweets and posts to start to pile up. Many people, rather than understanding that a 27 year old woman with family and loved ones - someone's daughter for Pete's sake - had died this afternoon, insisted on providing a snarky commentary based on their own presumptions and the version of her story that they created in their head. Perhaps their version of events may ultimately prove to be true. But at the time, it was completely inappropriate.

I was sickened by the jokes and snarky comments people made, by people's selfish behavior and refusal to understand that while Winehouse's death was certainly not surprising, it is no less tragic than if it had come as a complete surprise. A tremendous talent (admittedly, one that I didn't appreciate completely) was silenced and, as I said before, a woman not even 30 has had her life cut short.

I'll admit that back in 1994, when Kurt Cobain met a similar end, I was probably among the snarky ones. It didn't help that I was certainly no fan of Nirvana and I'm sure my take on it was "he was a junkie that deserved it." Well, I was 21 then, and with the benefit of 18 years, I'm ashamed of my behavior then, just like I'm sickened by those implying Winehouse "deserved" her fate or that somehow Winehouse's drug use made her death worth less or not worth mourning. To those people, I only have to remember the internet mantra..."too many anonymous internet assholes, not enough time." Only this time, they weren't so anonymous.

The world is full of pain and shit happens on a daily basis. Life is full of tragedies, large and small. It's how we deal with them that defines us. But more than that, it's how we feel for other people's tragedies, even if they don't seem that big to us that make us human. As I so frequently say, we just need to treat each other a little nicer. I wish I could say that in death, Amy Winehouse has received that respect that the dead deserve. Instead, it's been mostly vitriol and jokes that are simply, way too soon.

Her music will live on forever and there will certainly be a spike in interest. She won't be the first artist more celebrated after her death than while she was alive. Her short and tragic life is a reminder of the destructive effects of addiction and how, even though it shouldn't be, sometimes the addiction is stronger than the addict.

Shower inequality

In part as a response to this post and because Heidi is really feeling the need to get moving as well, we coughed up the cash for Ames Racquet & Fitness - probably the most popular of several gym/fitness center type places here in Ames. There are three locations in town - one of which being a 24 hour place - and I get a pretty decent discount through work, plus they reimburse me 9 bucks a month if I go 8 times in a month. So it's win-win, right? Although all I can think of is the time when Chandler wanted to quit the gym on Friends, I feel like it'll be a net positive, right?

I've gone a couple times now and it's all still shiny and new but what I'm really trying to do is establish the habit and pattern. I've established the habit and pattern before, only to smash it to pieces, but life is a series of successes and failures. As the old standard goes, you pick yourself up, dust yourself off and start all over again.

Heidi is all about showering at the gym, but in the couple times I've been there, I've come home and showered. Why, you ask? Because there's no damn privacy at the gym, that's why! Heidi was dumbstruck tonight when I explained to her that in the men's locker room, there is a small room with nozzles sticking out of the wall vs. the stalls with privacy curtains for the showers in the women's locker room. Why is there this inequity? I don't understand it? The shower heads are not even separated enough to keep you from standing in a total stranger's personal space!

I have never understood this, even though it has been a common occurrence throughout my life. It was that way in elementary, junior high and high school gym class. It was that way (most scarringly) my first couple years of college in my dorm. I remember showering at the weirdest times of the day so I didn't have to be in there with other people. It was such a shock that one time Jeff and his girlfriend at the time came over and Jeff, upon seeing the shocking lack of privacy in the showers, forced his girlfriend to come into the men's room to see. When I transferred to Iowa, I was lucky enough to live in a dorm where the showers had stalls - walls and curtains and the whole nine yards. Yeah, sometimes you had to wait for them, but you didn't have to stand there, naked as a jaybird in the middle of the restroom, waiting for a shower to open up, only to have to go stand next to someone that you might see at lunch later in the day. It was just all kinds of awkward.

What blows my mind is that the privacy is reserved for women who have so much more of a communal bathroom experience than men do. Guys know what I'm talking about - we all know the guy that doesn't know the rules of men's room etiquette. From what Heidi's told me, women talk to each other from inside stalls. What a completely foreign experience that must be.

I can't decide if the problem is with society or with me. I'll be the first to admit that even now, I have a terrible body image. I look in the mirror sometimes and wonder when I'll stop going through my awkward phase. The thing I guess I need to tell myself is that no one is looking and no one - no one that matters anyway - is judging.

It still is not fair though, but as Joan Crawford says, nobody ever said that life was fair, Tina.

There's something about marriage

I got home from work last night just in time to watch the initial results trickle in from Maine. Although many issues were on the ballot last night, the one we were all watching was the referendum on marriage equality - the so-called "people's veto." The state legislature in Maine approved marriage equality last summer, and the governor signed it into law, making Maine the 5th state in the US to grant marriage rights to all its citizens, not just its heterosexual ones. No sooner did this happen than those opposing it started rallying the troops and put the rights of a minority to an up/down vote.

We all know how it turned out, even though it was a real nail-biter for awhile. 52% of those voting chose to strip Maine's gay and lesbian residents of the right to marry, and in so doing, ripped away the privileges that all those in heterosexual marriages take for granted. Although these results make me sick, the fact that the majority was allowed to vote on whether or not a minority gets to have certain rights makes me even sicker. It is safe to say that most of those who voted yesterday in Maine's election were not gay or lesbian, yet here they are, determining what gays and lesbians should or should not be able to do, many (but not all) driven by fear, misinformation and religion which honestly have no place in making policy decisions.

One of the most frequent arguments I hear against marriage equality is that "it's against God's law!" I'm always amazed to hear that. I do not currently identify as a Christian, so that argument holds not one drop of water for me and the millions of others who do not subscribe to either an institutionalized religion or even to the simple concept of a God. Talk about forcing your beliefs on others. That's not to say that all Christians are against marriage equality - quite the contrary. There are many examples of that in Maine and elsewhere. What I would remind those that would be so quick to judge based on what their religion tells them to do is to remember the Great Commandment: LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOR AS YOURSELF. And yes, that includes your gay or lesbian neighbor whether you like it or not.

It is not until people who enjoy the invisible privilege of being in the majority are prevented from deciding that other people are second class citizens or not worthy of the same rights that they currently enjoy that this nonsense will finally stop. I think that will eventually require some kind of US Supreme Court decision which is certainly a long ways off. There was no up/down vote to abolish slavery, nor was there a ballot initiative asking that women's right to vote be rejected after it was granted. Were we to propose either of those, I'm sure it would elicit gasps of incredulousness from those who voted to reject Maine's marriage equality law. But there is no difference. Civil rights issues are civil rights issues.

I hope that the No on 1 people take this through the courts now. It is certainly an option, and one that will likely be heard. It is the job of the judicial system to protect a minority from the tyranny of the majority. While my choice of words may seem overdrawn, you may want to ask a same-sex couple in Maine if they feel that I'm being dramatic in my word choice. Chances are high that they'd feel exactly the same way. And in case you're wondering why I give a shit, as I'm neither a resident of Maine nor gay, and I currently enjoy all the benefits of a legally recognized marriage, it's about being empathetic for your fellow humans, especially those that may be experiencing a different life experience than you. Just because the system is working fine for you doesn't mean that it's working well for everyone.

Maybe it's time to get rid of marriage altogether, to chuck that word on the scrap heap of history so that those that oppose equal rights for gay and lesbian couples can stop being hung up on it. I'll gladly redefine my relationship with my wife so that my gay and lesbian friends can enjoy the same rights I have. But if we did that, those that oppose marriage equality would be forced to look at the real reasons that they oppose equality, which I bet are 100 times uglier than the religious beliefs they hide them behind.

There's no doubt that this will fade from the news cycle by the end of the week, but remember that here in Iowa, we're gearing up for a new legislative session and those that oppose the marriage equality we have here in Iowa will have a new target in their sites. To those of you reading that live within the state, I encourage you to donate time or money (or both) to One Iowa. Hell, do it even if you don't live here. The fight in Iowa is going to look a lot like the one in Maine. Outside money will pour into the state (admittedly, on both sides), and unless our Democratic leadership in the statehouse hold fast, opponents of marriage equality will demand a vote on a Constitutional Amendment here in Iowa, which is a much bigger deal than what was passed in Maine.

Time is ultimately on our side. Opposition to marriage equality will look antiquated in 50 years. But that doesn't mean we have to wait for it. And I will continue to do my small part to make sure that all citizens will be equally protected under the law.

Blast from the past

I have this long history of eagerly awaiting the arrival of the mail. When I was growing up, I actually wrote letters to a lot of people so I had a reason to obsessively check the mailbox during every commercial break of "The Young & The Restless." As an adult, I find myself still kind of excited by mail delivery, even though it's usually just bills and other things I don't particularly give a shit about.

I'm kind of in a "where's the mail, dammit?" mode because I ordered a Sticky & Sweet Tour shirt from the Live Nation store during a one day $9.99 sale. As I said on Facebook, I absolutely won't spend $30-50 on a crappy tour shirt that cost 50 cents to make, but I will spend 10 bucks. (I was looking for a link to it in the store, but it's apparently sold out. This is the one I bought.) Anyway, that didn't arrive today, but this did:

It is nothing less than a Blond Ambition Tour era postcard! I don't know if it's actually from that time period or not, but who cares because I love that photo! It is one of my all time favorite photos of Madonna. As it turns out my friend Matt found it at a record show he went to this weekend and knew that I would love it. And at only a buck, the price was right. I think it's frickin' awesome.

Semi-relatedly, Madonna's new video is available for free on iTunes right now. I think you almost get your money's worth with it at that price. I'm sorry, but if she isn't going to put any effort into making videos any longer, she just needs to STOP DOING THEM. I know that not everything can be a "Vogue" or "Express Yourself", but seriously! When was the last time she had anything approach the greatness of even some of her late 90s videos? This one is even lamer than the "Give It 2 Me" video was! (even though I kind of liked GI2M at first)

And then, to add insult to injury, there is a "deeeeluxe" (Heidi will get the reference) edition of Celebration on iTunes which is the single most horrific example of money grubbing I have witnessed in quite some time. OK, at 30 bucks, it's probably a deal. You get the two disc set, 30 videos and two bonus tracks, one being a remix of "Celebration" and the other a never-before-heard American Life b-side. I will NOT be purchasing it, mostly on principle but also because this is one rare example of me actually wanting the physical CD vs. the digital copy. I simply cannot justify spending the money twice this time around (like I did with Confessions and Hard Candy). Plus, there is a DVD coming out with FORTY SEVEN videos on it + I already own all those videos on the video collections already out. Paying all that extra dough for what boils down to one song? Forget it. The record company is begging for that to be pirated like crazy.

OK, I'm done bitching. For now. I'll be back tomorrow or the next day with a word or two or fifty about a couple of new releases to really be excited about.

Oink

I was doing dishes earlier today, looking pensive and Heidi said to me "What are you thinking about?" to which I answered, "Well, if you want to know the truth...swine flu." Bet she didn't see THAT coming.

I've been reading a lot about the outbreak of swine flu that seems to have started in Mexico City and has so far spread to 5 different states in the U.S., confirmed in 3 countries and suspected in up to 6 more. When I first started hearing rumblings of it a couple of days ago, it was hard not to jump to the worst case scenario. For those of you that don't know, the worst case scenario is The Stand in which a superflu wipes out pretty much the entire population of the world. But since we all know that's just a story, and I've actually had a couple people ask me what I think of this from a health care professional standpoint, I thought what the hell, even though I am not super-qualified to speak on it. After all, I'm neither a virologist or an epidemiologist.

The simple fact of the matter is that, despite what the government and the news media are telling you, no one knows what's going to happen. Right now, things are not pointing toward widespread mortality from this particular strain of swine flu. There could be significant morbidity, but that is something we're just going to have to wait and see on. It doesn't seem to have a high mortality rate - only 20 confirmed deaths in over 1400 cases - and everyone in the U.S. that has tested positive for the virus has recovered or is recovering. So that's good.

What's not so good is that I really do think that this is going to be a pandemic influenza. That does not mean that it's going to be Captain Tripps and it's the end of civilization as we know it. We've had flu pandemics before and the last one was the Hong Kong flu 41 years ago which was not particularly lethal (at least not compared to 1918-1919) but they do happen. It's also true that we are well overdue for an influenza pandemic. There's been some speculation as to how much immunity the flu vaccine from last fall will provide, which is likely none as this combination of existing pig, bird and human influenza viruses is novel.

The part that bothers me the most about this is how the media is treating this, which I would say is borderline negligent in its attempts to whip up mass hysteria. All mainstream media outlets are guilty of this, but two that I frequent are especially bad. The Drudge Report has multiple scary headlines as links, and the Huffington Post (which really, in my mind IS the liberal version of the Drudge Report and because of that is annoying me more with each passing day) has equally scary headlines in 48-point red font. This helps in no way or form and the only reason they're doing it is because it makes good copy and for our mainstream media, news and entertainment are completely indistinguishable from one another so why should they bother trying to differentiate now.

I think the real story lies somewhere between the OMG-scary-might-as-well-jump-off-a-bridge-now attitude of the news outlets and a minimalist "oh, it's no big deal." Yes, this is a big deal. No, it's likely not the end of the world (although I can't wait for some religious wacko to try to blame the swine flu on gay marriage. You watch. It'll happen.) But we're likely to see quite a few people get sick.

So we don't know what's going to happen with this, and ultimately, we can't control it. Worrying is just wasted energy.

In the meantime, here's the Google Map tracking cases of swine flu. And if you want to read a great book on the 1918-1919 Spanish influenza pandemic, here's the link, although now might not be the best time to start reading it!

Seven words

I'm buying a fucking Mac next time.

Boot to the head

Or rather, a shoe at the TV. Heidi and I just got done watching the first season of Ugly Betty and I seriously had to suppress the urge to throw my shoe at the television. There were so many things wrong with the season finale that I don't even know where to start. But, as Julie Andrews says, "let's start at the very beginning." So that's what we'll do. (TAKE NOTE: Here be spoilers, although I think it's hard to "spoil" something that was on TV a year ago. But if you're thinking of watching Ugly Betty and you haven't, you'd probably be wise to skip the rest of this post.)

Heidi and I have been enjoying Ugly Betty immensely as it is a great fusion of the hour long drama with some great laughs. It is exceptionally well written (for the most part) and also is just campy enough to keep us coming back without us rolling our eyes at its ludicrousness. The show details the comings and goings of Betty Suarez, normal girl from Queens, as she works for the fashion magazine MODE, home to decidedly non-normal people. Betty is the assistant to the editor-in-chief, a himbo that sleeps with anything in a skirt but who also happens to be the son of the CEO of the company that owns the magazine. There's some great secondary characters, especially the Scottish seamstress/designer Christina (she's very Stevie Nicks-ish in many ways), Joan Collins wanna-be Wilhelmina Slater (played fantastically by Vanessa Williams - who knew she had it in her?) and her flamingly gay assistant Marc ("I'll put out a Gay.P.B. with the assistants" is still probably the single best line of the whole season.)

I said that it kind of straddles the fence between being a comedy and a drama, but really, its best moments are when it is being funny. However, there are several poignant moments that can get you *right here* if you're not careful. Most of them involve Betty's nephew Justin who may or may not be of a certain sexual orientation, but his mother loves him dearly no matter what, and even his streetwise, mostly absent father came around to defending him by the end of the season. There is also the whole drama of Betty's father being an illegal immigrant and the budding romance between Betty and Henry, the geeky guy from the accounting department.

Most of the time, the writing is just great. Every now and again, we found ourselves watching it and kind of scratching our heads because it just wasn't the best. We referred to those episodes as "the drunk writer" episodes. Well, they must have really tied one on for the season finale and then done some coke off the big old glass table in the living room because they wrote shit in that came out of nowhere. In the space of an hour, we had:

1) Henry and Betty finally getting together, only to have his ex-girlfriend show up pregnant. He leaves to go back to Tuscon with his ex.
2) Hilda (Betty's sister) and Santos (her son's father) happy at last and planning to get married, only to have him gunned down in a convenience store robbery. Oh, and he missed his son performing in "West Side Story" to boot.
3) Daniel (Betty's boss) and Alexis (his brother who is now a post-op male-to-female transexual) involved in a car accident after the brakes to the car had been cut. They were driving their father's car and Alexis had paid off a hitman to take out their father. Oops! Now they're in the car.
4) Betty's father is stuck in Mexico because he can't get his visa and confronting some ambiguous "revenge" threat.
5) And in the only non-tragic but still out of left field plot development, Amanda is Fey Sommers' daughter. WTF?

That is not to say that it all sucked. There was a GREAT (as in hilariously great) bit where Marc had been traded away to another employer so that Wilhemina could get the wedding date that she wanted. Cut to Wilhemina reminiscing about all the times she had had with Marc as Vanessa Williams sings "The Way We Were" over it. That, my friends, is camp at its finest.

But mostly, it was the biggest WTF there ever was. Why the need to be so fucking melodramatic? I know that it's traditional to have cliffhangers at the end of the season, but at least build toward it! Don't just pull shit out of thin air in the name of being dramatic or tragic and expect me to go along for the ride. It has made me exceptionally wary of Season 2 (which is not out on DVD until September) although you know I'll at least start it because I want to see how this resolves. Even though it pissed me off.

I am not opposed to seeing tragedy, but at least don't have it blindside me. That just makes me angry and want to throw my size 11s at an expensive piece of electronics.

It's like they took a page out of the Joss Whedon handbook (a man who has lost A LOT of credibility with me in recent years.) I didn't even watch Dr. Horrible's Sing-A-Long Blog, but judging from the kind of reaction my wife had to the end of that, I don't ever need to see it.

I know there will be people that disagree with me, but that's what I think and I'm sticking to it.

Up on sugar pills, we go walking

A study published on Monday by British researchers has apparently shown that antidepressant medications are effective, but only in people that have the most severe forms of the disease. Predictably, this has been spun by the mainstream media into something that it is not. A quick Google News search turns up some of the following headlines:

Antidepressants just a placebo: study
Study concludes that antidepressants are ineffective
Antidepressants 'have no impact'

And my favorite: Antidepressants don't work.

As a health care professional, it's not the turning on the ear of commonly believed medical conventional wisdom that bothers me. That happens all the time. Case in point, when I was in pharmacy school, I was docked points on a case presentation I did because I did not recommend hormone replacement therapy to a 94 year-old female nursing home patient with severe dementia. Now, you rarely if ever see HRT given to any post-menopausal woman. (I'd like those points back, please, for being ahead of the curve.) But what does bother me is the misrepresentation of the data by news outlets that just want to sell papers, get ratings, or generate traffic to their web site.

While the caveats to the "antidepressants don't work" headline are in the articles, they are usually buried about a paragraph or two from the end. Most people don't bother reading newspaper articles past the first couple paragraphs, so for the majority of people the take-home message is "Antidepressants: They're Utter Shit."

The thing about the actual study is that it's a meta-analysis, which means that they took data from other studies and pooled them all together to create one big gargantuan study, hoping to glean new information. What the researchers did here was take clinical trials for three of the most common antidepressants (Prozac, Effexor, and Paxil) and one that does not enjoy the popularity of the other three (Serzone). All this data was pooled into one big pot and statistics applied to them. I'll be the first to admit that I'm no statistician, so I don't know much about what tests they applied to the data. When the data came out the other end of the statistics, the researchers found that there was no statistically or clinically significant difference between the antidepressants and placebos in all groups studied except for the most severely depressed patients.

This is all well and good but one thing is missing out of the mix here. Drug efficacy studies are not done by meta-analysis. They're done by randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trials. Whenever an efficacy study fails to meet these criteria, you can bet that there will be a slew of letters written to criticize the design of the study. Now, that having been said, it is exceptionally unlikely that we'll ever see a new round of randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trials because it is not financially advantageous to the drug companies. Sad, but true. And don't even get me started on studies that show negative results being buried by drug companies. That is truly shameful.

The other thing I will say is that, as someone who lives with depression and has a nearly 10 year history with antidepressants, the idea that the drugs will cure people is sadly misguided. They are but a component of a comprehensive treatment plan. For so many people, they have been miracle workers, yours truly included. My experiences with depression have mostly skewed toward the mild-to-moderate end of the spectrum. When I read Andrew Solomon's The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, his experience with depression made mine seem like Sunday afternoon in the park. But nonetheless, I know that I personally benefited from drug treatment. However, the drugs will only take you so far. There's work that you have to do and that does not fit in very well with our "a pill will fix you" culture. You have to do the mental work, you have to make the changes in outlook and mindset that are needed. What antidepressant medication does, in my opinion, is give you the boost out of the mud. When I was at my worst, getting dressed in the morning required incredible effort, let alone doing my job and being a functional partner and parent. To even begin to think about trying to make the mental changes in mindset required to lift myself out of the muck was more than I could bear. But once the drugs kicked in, that kind of mental effort was easier to bear. Relying on the drugs to fix everything would have been foolhardy.

We've known for a long time that the combination of drugs and talk therapy are more effective than either of the two on their own, which was conveniently ignored by the meta-analysis and the mainstream news stories that followed. In my estimation, what we need to take from this data is that folks who suffer from depression can't expect a pill to do all the work.

But they do work. I've witnessed it. I've lived it. That may be anecdotal evidence (which is held in even lower esteem than meta-analysis) but it is some of the most powerful evidence I have. They work but like everything else in life, you can't have unreasonable or unrealistic expectations regarding their abilities.

(Props to Dolly for providing the inspiration for the title of this post. I've had that damn song stuck in my head for days!)